


Choice and Chance

by kla1991



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Depression, F/F, Mental Illness, Mentions of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-07-16
Packaged: 2018-01-11 16:05:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 69,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1175050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kla1991/pseuds/kla1991
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When vapors rise up from a temple in Greece, things get a bit... Warehouse-y. Helena and Myka try to take care of it, with mixed results. A Bering and Wells fix-it fic for just about everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pythia

**Author's Note:**

> This story deals in part with mental health conditions that affect many people in a lot of different ways. I’m pulling from experience and research for this information. If I present something inaccurately, please let me know. And if you have any helpful resources, I’d love to have them. 
> 
> Also, I am happy to trigger warn for anything, chapter by chapter; just let me know.

Artie was doling out inventory assignments at the breakfast table, and Pete and Claudia were playing rock paper scissors to decide who had to flush the gooery, when Helena raised a hand.

“Shouldn’t we be checking on Delphi?” 

“What? No,” Artie barked. “We keep an eye on Delphi, it’s fine.” 

He took a breath to scold Pete and Claudia, who had reached best of ten and were still going, but Myka interrupted him.

“What’s at Delphi?”

“Not your inventory assignment!” Artie said, then turned his attention to the other agents.

Helena leaned toward Myka, closer than was probably necessary, and whispered, “The temple of Apollo has to be well maintained because of the frequent earthquakes in Greece. There’s a spring underneath it, and when the vapors from the water and stone rise to the surface things can get a bit…”

“Warehouse-y?” Myka offered, and Helena chuckled. “But I thought the spring dried up. There have been archeological studies there, and no one’s found any water.”

“That’s because we don’t want them to. It’s difficult to say how the temple works, exactly. The spring is part of the water system, but it only causes visions at the temple site, and so it must interact in some way with the earth or the structure, or perhaps the history itself. The temple and spring are impossible to move, too large to have been contained in Warehouse 3, and besides that, it was sacred. Damming the spring keeps it from causing trouble.”

“But the earthquakes damage the dam.” 

Helena smiled, and watched Myka catch her breath at the sight. “Exactly.” 

“Artie, are you sure we shouldn’t check on the temple in Delphi?” Myka demanded.

When his glare settled not on Myka but on her, Helena winced and sank down in her chair. The good graces she had won with her time machine had been minimal, and they were clearly wearing thin. 

“There is no problem at Delphi, and until there is, there is no reason to pull agents off of other duties and…”

“So, wait,” Claudia butted in. “Do we just wait for some tourist to get whammied before we do anything?”

Artie turned his glare from Helena to Claudia and decided the matter of gooery flushing beyond the shadow of a doubt.

While Helena had decided it was not in her best interest to argue with Artie about Delphi, Myka had latched onto the idea, and between her badgering and the annoyance of Helena’s presence, Artie gave in and seized the chance to be rid of them both. Myka let Helena drive to the airport, despite the hair-raising adventure her last trip behind the wheel had been. Once on the international flight, Myka carefully calculated the time difference between South Dakota and Greece, set her watch, and went to sleep. Covering her up was a courtesy any friend would give, and when her head fell onto Helena’s shoulder, it would of course have disrupted her meticulously managed jet lag prevention schedule to wake her. Petting her hair was something Helena didn’t realize she was doing until it was much too late. They had traded such affections before, and more intimate ones, but always when Helena chose; it was meant to be conscious, limited, not habitual. She stared out the window and wondered if perhaps this false alliance had gone too far, but when Myka shifted against her, the thought was cast aside. It wouldn’t matter much longer, anyway. 

 

The story given by travel agencies was that recent earthquakes had made the ground near the Temple of Apollo unstable, and so visitors could travel only so far up the Sacred Way. These visitors were also strictly watched and kept to particular paths, which made it easier for Myka and Helena to sneak in from the side and intersect the Sacred Way above the roadblock that kept tourists out. Easier, that is, if one considered trailblazing up the side of a mountain easy. The rocks were loose underfoot, and the grass was coarse and short, cramming itself out through cracks in the ground. Helena found herself snatching at it when she stumbled, panting. Myka hopped up the mountain like a goat, pausing every few feet to haul Helena up behind her. 

“I’m from the Rockies,” she said when Helena finally stopped dead and watched her slack-jawed as she climbed. “I’m used to this kind of thing. Come on, we’re almost there.” 

“We’d better be,” Helena growled, but she was smiling, and Myka laughed. 

“Delphi gets a million visitors every year. That’s more than twenty-seven hundred people a day.”

Helena nodded. “It was busy a hundred years ago, as well. There used to be two days a year like this, when the temple was closed off, and an agent could come and check on things. I wonder why that’s no longer so.” 

“World War I,” Myka explained. “The Warehouse’s contact here used an artifact to protect the sacred sites in Greece, and when the war was over, he wouldn’t give it up. He passed it down through his family, and we haven’t really been on friendly terms with any of them since then. But hey, maybe this trip will prove that having us out here sometimes is better than letting random tourists go into convulsions first.” 

Helena agreed, and the two of them picked their way down the slope that led to the Sacred Way. It was noon, the sun was glaring down, and even Myka was getting short of breath. The stone block she sank down on was likely the remains of some ancient offering to the gods, and she looked beautiful, like her visage should have been carved there to bless all passers by. Helena turned away and began removing her boots and jewelry. 

“What are you doing?”

“Taking precautions,” Helena explained, a hand at her ear to remove her pearl earrings. “The oracle here, she’s called the Pythia.” 

Myka nodded, and of course she would know the oracle’s name. Helena smiled and continued. “If she appears, she likes to take payment. You shouldn’t bring anything of value into the temple, or there’s some chance you’ll never see it again.”

“Why are you taking off your shoes?”

Helena shrugged and accepted the watch Myka held out to her. “I like my shoes.” 

Myka grinned, and Helena tucked the boots full of jewelry under a green olive tree beside the road. The air was cool this high up the mountain, and she had caught her breath. Silence rushed through the valley below them like a river. It must have been a long while, she thought, since someone had made this journey in such peace. Helena was breathing it into her lungs when Myka spoke.

“Is that what she took from you the last time you were here? Your shoes?”

And of course, Helena thought, of course she would know that, too.

“No,” was the only answer she gave.

The ground was jagged and too warm under her feet, but the pain of it didn’t slow Helena’s stride. She arrived quickly, with Myka silent by her side, at what remained of the temple of Apollo. The six columns cast little shadow in the noon light. A gently sloping ramp between two of them led into the temple. Once inside, the ruins staggered down into a sunken pit covered with grass a little greener, a little less harsh than what grew along the road. Helena picked her way across the worn and broken stonework, stopping at a large slab at the edge of the pit. 

“There should be meters and controls under here, if things still work as they did,” Helena said.

Myka knelt across from her, and the two of them heaved; the stone lifted easily. When Helena stepped into the pit to take a look at the tarnished brass mechanisms underneath the slab, her foot sunk into damp ground.

“That is not a good sign,” she muttered.

She was scrubbing dirt off one of the meters when Myka whispered her name. Helena turned to the woman beside her and saw her swaying.

“What is that smell?” 

Breathing deeply, Myka sank onto the step of the temple and stared away. Helena was reaching out to shake her when the vapors filled her senses, and she stumbled backward into the pit, her bare feet squelching in the mud. 

“Myka?” she called, “Myka we need to get out of…”

Then her eyes fell on the Pythia. She was dark skinned, as richly curved as the mountains spread before them, and her smile was too pitying for Helena’s taste. 

“It was strange to know you would come again, when your first journey cost you so much,” the Pythia said. “Your second infraction, was it not?”

Helena snarled, “You gave me nothing!”

“There was nothing to give! Your daughter is gone.” 

“You come here to tell me what I already know?” 

The Pythia sat down on the step of the temple and watched Helena tense at how close to Myka she was. She breathed deeply of the vapors leeching up through the ground and said, “Did you know, Helena, that you are a god?”

At these words, Helena felt a weight in her hands, the smoothed handle of the Minoan trident firm in her grip. The earth shook under her, but she stood unmoved.

“You, no one else, decide what is to come. I see no future but one that you create. And this girl.” The Pythia turned to Myka, tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, ran her fingers along her jaw while Helena ground her teeth. “You know by now that she will come for you. Knew that all along. But you rule her, too.” 

The air was still thin, still warm, but something was shifting. Helena could no longer smell the spring’s vapors, but there was water flowing. It was a hallucination, and if she could only hold her breath or clear her head, she could escape. 

“You make the choice,” the Pythia told her. “Do you rule the world where you love her, or the one where you kill her? Because that is all it will take. She will stand with you at the end of the world, and all she will ask of her lover...”

Helena focused at this glimpse of the future, and the Pythia smiled.

“And her god, is that you take her first.” 

The vision took her, and Yellowstone loomed. When the Pythia reached out to her, Helena caught her arm in a hard grip, screaming, “No! Stay away from me!”

It was Myka’s arm she was bruising, Myka wincing in pain and wild with fear. She ripped her arm away, replaced it with a gun, and something had gone horribly wrong. The trident was in Helena’s other hand, hanging point down over the ground. Myka was shouting, and it was too much to take in until two words snapped it all into place: “Kill me.”

The gun was pressed against Myka’s head, Helena’s finger curled around the trigger, and Myka was talking her through it. 

“Do it! Kill me now. I mean, we’re all gonna die anyway, right, so what’s the difference? So shoot me.”

All of Helena’s rage was there, at the back of her throat, and if she opened her mouth it would pour out, ready to serve her. The Pythia was right; she could have the world at her feet, if she would only take this helpless girl. But she was shouting and shaking and Helena had never seen her cry. 

“I want you,” she said, “to look me in eyes and take my life.”

“No.”

It did not drip from her like the rage at her throat, was not scooped out like her confession at Point Clear, that she had come all that way only to see this helpless girl. Helena looked her in the eyes and made her choice. 

It ripped her apart, and she howled at the rending and fell on her hands and knees in the sodden grass of the temple.


	2. Thorndike

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: discussion of suicide

“Where’s H. G.?” Claudia asked Myka at the same moment that Pete asked her if, for once in her life, she actually had jet lag. She chose to ignore Pete.

“She wasn’t feeling well, so I dropped her off at Leena’s.” Myka set the bag of tools to repair the temple dam on Artie’s desk and tried to look apologetic. “We both got whammied pretty hard.”

Artie scowled, and Myka was ready to insist that it was a good thing, really, because better Warehouse agents than anyone else, right? And thank god H. G. had suggested checking on things because there had been a lot of damage, but Artie wasn’t interested in that. All he asked was, “What did you see?”

Myka remembered every detail of what she had seen, but she had always shrugged at dreams; even as a child, she had battled monsters in the dark with a flashlight under her pillow instead of running to her parents’ bed to hide. What she had seen at the temple didn’t worry her like what had happened after. Helena crying. Helena standing abruptly, grass stains on her knees and mud on her hands from collapsing on the ground, and muttering, “Let’s get this done.” Helena utterly silent for hours and hiding away now at Leena’s, alone.

“Why does it matter?” Myka asked instead of answering the question, because what she had seen was a nightmare, nothing more.

“Because if you saw something that I should know about, I would like to have that information so I can integrate it into future decisions,” Artie said.

“You’re not serious, are you?” Myka laughed. “You want to take advice from a freaky artifact hallucination?”

“I can get you some tarot cards if that would help, too,” Claudia snickered, but Leena shot her a glare.

“The oracle at Delphi doesn’t lie, Myka,” she said. “If you had a vision, it was real.”

Artie nodded, digging through the papers on his desk and preaching, “Exactly! The Pythia herself isn’t real, of course, whoever she was is long, looong dead, but the water, or the chemicals in the water, captured her image, and it can project… Myka! Myka?”

Myka stood still so long that Pete shoved her and asked if she was awake. She punched him automatically and regretted it; there was nothing on his face but worry. What her own face looked like, she couldn’t imagine.

“The oracle said I was dying.”

An hour later, Artie was demanding that Myka tell him exactly what had happened for the second time, Pete was on the phone with an oncologist in Pierre, South Dakota, and Claudia was curled up on the couch, trying not to panic. Leena, uncertain how to intervene, left to cook dinner and relieve herself of the clamor of anxious auras. Myka regretted having said anything and was debating the merits of pleading exhaustion and hiding away in the Bed and Breakfast with Helena. Helena would understand without a word what she needed right now; Myka had no idea what she needed, but Helena would know. She decided against it, though, because Helena had needed to be left alone.

A few moments later, Leena called Artie’s Farnsworth, and the tension escalated.

“Artie,” she said, “H. G. Wells is gone.”

 

Harper Thorndike, the Warehouse psychiatrist, found her standing in the shade of a little tree in front of the Greyhound bus station in Atlanta, just where she said she would be.

The Regents had called him first, of course. There had been a general alert sent out to all Warehouse staff, that H. G. Wells was on the loose, dangerous and wanted for questioning. When she had called him herself a day later, panting, “Sanctuary,” into a payphone, it was hard to say whether he had expected it or not. He’d certainly been hoping.

She looked calm, like she had the first time they’d met, unfazed by noise or traffic or stifling heat. If she was a little pale, if her eyes were red and ringed with purple, it had no effect on the serenity of her stance or the power of her beauty. Only her right hand, tense and defensive across her chest, looked truly injured. It was a wonder, he thought, how this woman could lie.

“Hello, Doctor,” she said, turning her eyes but not her head toward him.

“Miss Wells.”

Her eyes returned to the street, darted about, and she held her breath a moment, tensing as if she would run, before taking one small step forward and around, saying airily, “Shall we, then?”

Harper picked up the duffel on the ground and led her to his car. She glanced into the back seat before sliding in the front passenger side when he opened the door.

“There’s no one here but me,” he assured her.

She smiled.

“Welcome to Atlanta,” he said as they pulled out of the bus station parking lot. “Should I call you Miss Wells, or H. G., or something else?”

“As you like.”

“But what would you like?”

She looked at him, again, with a barely perceptible shift of her head, then turned back to the passing traffic for so long Harper didn’t expect an answer.

“My name is Helena,” was the answer he finally got.

“And when was the last time you ate something, Helena?”

She chuckled, and Harper set a brown paper bag in her lap, murmuring, “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Helena pulled the bag closer to her with her bandaged hand but made no move to open it. At a stoplight, Harper took a closer look. The fingers were swollen, the nail beds more purple than they should have been, and that was a problem. She wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t talk, he could manage that; but he was not a medical doctor, and a broken hand was not something he could fix. He would have to call someone for that.

 

“Are you insane?” Vanessa Calder shouted, and Harper thanked his lucky stars that Helena was waiting in his office, on the other side of a massive oak door. He had forgotten how loud Vanessa could be.

“She came to me for help. What was I supposed to do, turn her away?”

“Not turn her away, turn her in! The Regents can put a stop to this, make sure…”

Harper protested, “The Regents would destroy her!”

“And she wouldn’t be able to destroy anyone else. Harper, she’s dangerous.”

“To herself, sure, and I can deal with that. Any other threat she is or was, she came to me, which means she wants to get better. Do you know how hard that is, Vanessa?” Harper demanded, “For her to admit she needs help? For anyone to?”

Vanessa glared at him. “Do you know what relapse is?”

“I’m a doctor, Vanessa,” Harper said. “The bare minimum I can manage is to do no harm, and letting the Regents get to her would hurt her beyond repair. And there’s a chance I can help her!”

“And what if you can’t?”

“I can’t do any worse by her than the Regents have,” Harper said, shrugging. When Vanessa started shouting again, he tried to calm her, insisting, “Why would building up a healthy, stable relationship and treating her mental health problems result in the same issues as a hundred years of torture? She obviously trusts me. She wants to do this, to be better. How can I refuse her? What good would that do?”

“Why are you so attached to her?”

Vanessa was quiet then, watching him. They had always been honest with each other, every day for twenty years. Looking back, the words he clamped down on then might have been the only ones in the world he had tried to keep from her. Tried being the operative word. She knew he had something to say, and she waited long enough he almost said it. But then she sighed and told him, “The minute something goes wrong, Harper. She’ll get no more chances from me.”

Helena was sitting in a waiting room chair when Vanessa wrenched the office door open, and it was remarkable how relaxed she was, how little she flinched. Polly, the dear young undergrad who worked for him, cast Harper a look that was almost curious, but she knew better than to ask questions. Thank god. Vanessa scolded him for all sorts of things, Helena being the latest, but she never denied that Harper always hired the best.

“Let’s take a look,” Vanessa said when the office door had shut again behind them, and Helena began to roll the bandages away.

Two days of travel had covered the outer layer with grease and grime. Under that, there was a brittle crust of blood, spreading wider with every layer removed. Harper screwed his eyes shut and took deep breaths, and Vanessa told him to sit down before he passed out.

“Honestly, Harper, how did you handle having a period?” she asked, the familiar banter slipping out in the presence of a stranger.

It was the first time he’d thought of Helena as a stranger, but he had only met her once before, and she was so very old, and what would she think of him? He opened his eyes to glance at Helena’s face, but if she had reacted at all, he had missed it. She was clenching her jaw against the tug of old bandages on messy scabs. That had to hurt a lot more than she was showing, Harper thought as he closed his eyes again.

“Isn’t that Tesla’s hand?” he heard her ask.

Vanessa replied, “One of the first x-ray images ever taken, back in 1892.”

“Where were you then?” Harper asked.

He could feel Helena looking at him, and the floorboards creaked under Vanessa’s shoes as she squirmed.

“In London, with Christina. I hadn’t yet come to the Warehouse. But Nikola Tesla gave us this picture and the earliest models of the Tesla ray gun as gifts after we stopped a disaster at the World’s Fair that next year. Quite the adventure.”

“Who was ‘us’?” Harper asked, but Vanessa interrupted.

“Lucky for you, the picture’s an artifact. Hold your hand up to the light.”

Harper had seen the x-ray in action before, when his middle child had fallen out of a tree a few years ago. Passing light through it while holding an injured body part up in front of it would cause the film to display an accurate x-ray, but only for a few seconds. It was difficult, Vanessa had complained before, to read the image quickly enough, and it could only be taken once. Vanessa muttered to herself now about sprains, dislocation, and fracture, and Harper wished he could make himself look.

Finally, Vanessa asked, “What did you do?”

“I punched a wall,” Helena answered, and Harper thought he would give just about anything to hear any emotion in her voice.

“Because…”

“Because I was trying to kill myself.”

Harper’s eyes snapped open. Vanessa was frozen with a package of butterfly closures half open, staring, and Helena glanced between them, one eyebrow raised, as if they should have expected that. Maybe they should have.

“I couldn’t find my gun, but there’s wiring in the walls I could have got hold of, or at least there ought to have been. Knowing Leena’s, the old house might have consciously spared my life. Though of course electrical wiring has grown rather more complex over time.”

Vanessa cleared her throat and started explaining Helena’s injuries to her. Harper tried to listen and plan for twenty-four hour suicide watch at the same time; he’d have to have an answer ready when Vanessa started in on him. At least there was nothing particularly deadly in the storage room above his office.

 

Myka tapped the fresh drywall, and when her fingers came away dry, she pulled a sheet of sandpaper out of the pack on Helena’s desk. Pete stood in the doorway, watching her gently sand the repaired patch.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Someone has to,” Myka replied, gritting her teeth to prevent sanding the wall too hard.

“Yeah, someone from the hardware store. He does make house calls.”

“Why pay someone else to come in here and do it when I can do it myself?”

Pete took a breath and told her, “Because it’s eating you alive to be in this room.”

The sandpaper bit too deeply into the fresh drywall, and Myka growled and snatched up the putty knife. Pete was muttering about how maybe they shouldn’t have used the durational spectrometer, because watching H. G. Wells in a frothing rage wasn’t helping them find her; he didn’t get her, didn’t get what had happened. Myka heard the words and discarded them, stirring them out like the clumps in the drywall compound. For a second, he was quiet.

Then he asked, “How close did she get to the wires?”

“Two inches off.” Myka spread a fresh layer of drywall compound and scraped it thin with the putty knife, until the gashes she’d made with the sandpaper were invisible. Part of her was tempted to damage it again, just so she could listen to the sound of her work instead of Helena in her head, over and over, flinging useless bullets across the room and howling, Where’s my gun?

She had carried it into the temple. Both of them had been too dazed to realize that it was gone when they left, spirited away by the Pythia.

“She warned me, Pete.”

“What?”

“She warned me,” Myka repeated, “not to bring anything into the temple that I valued. That the Pythia would steal it. I didn’t think she could take Helena.”

Pete shook his head, insisting, “This is not your fault, Mykes. She saw something, just like you did.”

“I should have asked. She was so… I knew something was wrong.”

This was not true only at the temple of Apollo. Once in a while Myka would catch Helena staring into the distance, unhearing when she called, or her footsteps would creak overhead while Myka sat reading in the living room, back and forth across the same few paces of her bedroom floor. Something had always been wrong. Just not when Helena looked at her, or, on random occasions, kissed her, and Myka had let herself believe those moments would be enough.

“I should have stayed with her. I could have stopped it, or…”

“I don’t think she’d give you a chance to stop it,” Pete said.

Myka slumped into Helena’s desk chair and stared at the patch in the drywall. Pete leaned against the desk beside her.

“You gonna stare at it until it dries?”

The question hung unanswered, and Myka didn’t move.

“Look, it’s late. Go to sleep, and…”

“I can’t go to sleep,” Myka said.

Pete clapped a hand on Myka’s shoulder. Her head jerked toward him, and the tension in her face and shoulders almost made him lose his train of thought.  
“What?” he finally choked out. “That’s almost like saying I can’t eat. You can sleep through anything, Mykes, and it’ll be good for you. Just think, the more you sleep, the faster the time goes, and the faster the time goes…”

“The more likely it is that she’s dead.”

“The closer you are to the day when we find her.”

Myka stared at him a moment, then turned her gaze back to the wall. Pete told her not to sit there all night and left her, knowing there was nothing else he could do.

 

“The house is divided in half by the porch,” Harper pointed over his shoulder, out the window. Helena glanced out and nodded. “Other half is my house. Ready to lift this? One, two, three!”

Helena’s fractured hand was in a Velcro cast and a sling, but she’d been lifting as much weight with her one good hand as he could with all his might. The two of them heaved the last bit of dusty furniture into a corner at last, and the little space was more or less livable. There was a chaise lounge that looked too much like something Sigmund Freud would own, a pile of blankets, a little chest of drawers with one drawer stuck half open, and a battered desk on one end of the room, and heaps of moldering files in boxes stacked on the other. For the hideout of an ex-super villain, it really wasn’t bad.

Super villain. Helena Wells knelt on the battered hardwood floor and tried to repair the chest of drawers, coaxing the sticky drawer open and studying the inner workings in the fading daylight, and Harper couldn’t imagine her as she’d described herself that afternoon: H. G. Wells, destroyer of worlds.

A few moments of sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against the wall and the stubborn drawer in her lap, and she was asleep.


	3. Protocol Breach

For a while, Helena leaned back on the chaise lounge watching Tierra rub her forehead and try to work on her dissertation. It was like watching a bird try to eat an entire slice of bread at once.

“Twenty questions?” she offered somewhere between midnight and one in the morning. They’d been playing that game for the past few nights, Helena guessing what Tierra was thinking, Tierra giving absent-minded yes or no answers.

“No.”

“No?” Helena echoed, sitting up.

Tierra threw her pen down and huffed, “You always win! It gets old.”

“But I ask such engaging questions.”

“You ask weird-ass questions,” Tierra said. “I don’t know how much a chipmunk weighs in ounces, and I don’t think there’s poetry about hot dogs, but you never know with people. No more twenty questions.”

Helena draped herself on the lounge again and considered going to sleep. She had been constantly monitored for the past week, a condition she agreed to, but how difficult the arrangement would make sleeping hadn’t occurred to her. Sleeping with a stranger in her bed, it turned out, was considerably easier than sleeping with a stranger fully awake and in the same room. Most often, sleep would take Helena unwilling, either splayed like this or cramped in a waiting room chair during the eight hours she was watched over by Polly. Dr. Thorndike was beginning to worry about it.

Eyes shut, the ache in Helena’s joints became more demanding. She shifted, and her knees and elbows groaned. It was normal, Dr. Thorndike had said, for depression to manifest as physical pain, and becoming familiar with how her body responded to her mind would help her heal, and stay well once she had recovered. Helena stood in one smooth, painful motion, and started pacing. Hip, knee, ankle protested in turn. She shook her head, and it became so heavy she was almost dizzy with holding it up.

“New game?” Tierra offered.

She was watching her. Helena stood still in the middle of the floor.

“Twenty questions, ten each. Whatever question you ask, you gotta answer it, too.”

“I’m intrigued,” Helena replied, and she lowered herself onto the lounge once more. “Will you begin, or shall I?”

“What did he diagnose you with?”

Helena sighed. “Clinical depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. You?”

“Perfectionism, but that’s not in the DSM. I’m here because I needed a job that wouldn’t interfere with my work, and me and Thorndike go way back.”

“How do you know him?” Helena used her first turn to ask.

Tierra leaned back in her chair and tossed her feet onto the desk. “He used to do social work, Child Protective Services and all that. Me and my parents were in there a lot.”

“They were abusive?” Helena asked, forcing her mind away from the fury that always came with the thought of children. And she found herself remembering Myka.

“No,” Tierra snarled, “They’re poor and black. Thorndike was the same, though, and nice. He’d talk to us, make sure all the crazy crap didn’t screw us up. Shit’s traumatic, man. And then I just kinda hung around.”

“He’d make quite the mentor, I imagine,” Helena said. “My story’s less interesting than yours. I found his number in a phone book.”

“Bullshit.”

Helena shot her a challenging look and tried to clamp down on a tremor of fear.

“Anyone else with your problems would be in a hospital, but you? You’re living in a man’s attic, with that man, his secretary, and a PhD candidate looking after you. This ain’t some textbook mental breakdown, it’s more of Thorndike’s freaky shit.”

“Freaky shit?” The words stuck to her tongue like a bad flavor, curious skepticism tinged with the dirty newness of her first modern swear.

Tierra looked like she might argue; Helena was questioning out of turn, probing uninvited for more information, she knew. But then Tierra shrugged.

“He was helping me with scholarship stuff in his office once, late. This was like twelve years ago, thirteen maybe. He was all hung up on this kid who was in foster care and kept running away. Boy was four, and the cops had found him on the street three different times. Nobody could figure out how he kept getting away. And then he was just… there. Waving at us through a window in Thorndike's office that hadn’t been there before, and Thorndike called 911. CDC swooped in, said they were tracking down some bad mushrooms or something. Hallucinagens. They ripped out his ceiling to check for mold, and Thorndike was running his own private practice all a sudden, and the little kid was his, and…” She laughed. “Nobody explained it to me. Polly’s seen it, too, shit she can’t explain. It just happens to him. And you’re part of that.”

It wasn’t a question. Helena gave it no answer, and Tierra moved on.

Sometime in the middle of Tierra’s answer to “How do you stand this wretched heat?” Helena fell asleep. A wrenching shriek of wood on wood woke her. Gasping, she cast around her in the dim light of Tierra’s desk lamp until she spotted the chest of drawers, the one she had repaired, with one drawer hanging halfway open.

When Helena was calm enough to settle down again, Tierra turned back to her textbook, muttering, “Freaky shit.”

 

 

“Why are we doing this again?” Claudia grumbled, fingers at the ready for when Artie barked another name at her.

“Because,” Artie answered, “the last time H. G. Wells was out there, she used the name of one of her characters as a pseudonym.”

“Edward Prendick.”

“Yes! And she’s a vain little villain who wants her achievements known and lauded. She’d love to have someone recognize the name from one of her books when she claims it as her own.”

“And you really think anyone would recognize,” Claudia read back the name of the last random character Artie had discovered in the Warehouse copy of The Invisible Man, “J. A. Jaffers?”

Artie scowled at her, rumbling, “We have to widen the net.”

He returned to the book, skimming each page for a name he had missed when they’d done this ten days ago. Claudia widened the radius of their hospital admittance search to five hundred miles in all directions, then expanded slightly further along the highways H. G. might have travelled down. She was already monitoring every airport in the country, every police station, in case H. G.’s driver’s license, passport, or Secret Service ID number was entered anywhere. Every Warehouse 13 account she might have had access to, and a few she hadn’t, was being examined for breaches and anomalies. A third Salinger Inventory Scan was running in the background, and despite the fact that the last two had turned up nothing missing, Artie had Pete, Myka, and Leena doing inventory again. The pings were piling up, but Claudia had stopped mentioning that; every time she did, she was reminded not only that H. G. Wells was the most pressing pursuit, but also that Myka was frequently off-duty because of doctor’s appointments. That two doctors conducting a vast array of tests had come to the conclusion that Myka was perfectly healthy hadn’t eased the staticky tension that buzzed around her. And of course, the days ticking by without news of H. G. didn’t help that, either.

“Have you ever thought maybe sending Myka out to wander around a while might reel her in? I mean, Myka’s kind of an H. G. Wells magnet.”

Artie shook his head. “No, whatever Wells wanted from Myka, she got it. She’s had weeks of access to this place, she had a chance to slip away, and she took it!”

“Or maybe she had a vision at Delphi, too,” Claudia suggested. “Myka said she was really freaked.”

“Yes, and Myka’s judgment is so sound when it comes to that woman.”

Claudia was about to push that point when Myka came into the office with Pete on her heels.

“All quiet in Montgomery,” she announced. “Anything happening up here?”

“Besides Artie slowly morphing into Captain Ahab? Not much.”

The literary reference brought a tight-lipped smile to Myka’s face, and Pete signed out the score while only Claudia was looking at him: she had earned three “make Myka smile” points today, but apparently Pete had been on a roll, with seven to his name. Of course, “smile” was a generous term, and he might have cheated somehow.

Artie cleared the table of books when Pete broke out the snacks. Claudia watched Myka chew through an impressive number of cookies while counting aloud the number of M&M’s Pete caught in his mouth in a row. She was up to twelve, not counting the two do-overs Pete had begged her for, and she was on the verge of laughter when the computer pinged.

The M&M currently in the air bounced off Pete’s nose, and the clatter of candy on the floor was the only sound for a long moment. Personally, Claudia couldn’t believe her ears.

It was “Jaffers,” she thought. Someone out there got stuck with that name, Jaffers, and it’s screwing up my search.

“We got her,” Artie finally whispered, and Claudia dove for the computer before he could touch it. Myka was trembling, and Artie was bound to say something tactless that would only upset her more. Delaying whatever commentary he might have would give Claudia a better shot at keeping things civil.

When she read the notice on the screen, though, she had no idea what to say.

Priority 3 Protocol Breach. Account tracking. Internal funds accessed. Protocol Breach, Protocol Breach, rolled along the bottom of the alert in an endless loop, and the whole thing was flashing red.

“I’m gonna kill her.” It was barely a whisper near Claudia’s ear. “I’m gonna kill her!”

Myka was out the door like a shot, but Claudia still heard her scream.


	4. One Good Thing

“So McPherson weaseled his way into a teaching position at this college, and not only did he get Joshua Donovan to mess with artifacts and practically hand-deliver him a case of anti-matter, he just… What, hung out here trolling for students who might be useful?”

Myka shrugged, and Pete gave up trying to engage her and just stared across the college lawn, watching three nervous boys approach them. 

It had taken several days of exhaustive research, including some dubious online activity by Claudia, to track the money leaking from the Warehouse 13 account to these kids, archeology students at Claudia’s brother’s alma mater. Student records indicated no scheduled activities over the summer, but when asked, all three mothers had informed them that their sons were on a school-sponsored dig in Peru. 

John, however, had answered his cell phone, and the three had agreed to meet Pete and Myka on campus.

They were filthy, and they looked hungry. One of them, a shaggy-haired white boy named Terry, smelled so strongly that Pete edged away from him. Apparently, they had blown all their money in China and had been camping in the woods near campus for almost a week. It was just like Egypt, they said, except in Egypt, one Dr. Griffin had kept them fed. 

“This woman?” Myka asked, and they all nodded at the picture of H. G. Wells.

“Nice lady,” John said. 

“Nice bod,” Terry added, and the third boy, Rod, smacked his shoulder and glared.

“Dr. Griffin was the name of the invisible man,” Myka whispered to Pete. He cleared his throat and asked where the boys had met her.

“On campus,” Terry said. “She showed up after one of my classes, said she had a job for me and two other guys. I brought these losers, and she met us here.”

It was a good place to meet, a small garden at the crest of a hill. At least one bench was obscured by low-hanging tree branches, but the entire perimeter could be watched easily, and conversation halted before interlopers overheard. 

“We talked for ages up here, and she took us to dinner, too. She was cool,” Rod said. 

“Why did she choose you?”

“Are we in trouble?” Terry asked.

Pete and Myka exchanged glances. 

“That depends,” Myka told him. “You’re mixed up in some serious business, that much you know. But if we can understand what happened here and why you’re involved, we can start to figure out if you’re accessories or victims. So, why did she choose you?”

Terry took off his ball cap and ran a hand through his greasy hair. “She said she knew Professor Reynolds. I’d worked for him before, same kind of stuff.”

“Reynolds?” Myka repeated.

“McPherson,” Pete said. 

“And what kind of stuff did Reynolds have you doing?”

“What I do best,” Terry answered. “Digging.” 

“Illegal, unsanctioned, international digging.”

Terry nodded.

“And selling the artifacts he dug up on the black market,” Myka muttered, and Pete agreed.

“And were you two involved in any of this?” Pete asked.

Egypt was their first, the other boys said, but both of them had needed a helping hand. John’s parents were divorcing, which strained the family finances, and Rod had been going to community college in Pittsburg until this offer came along. Dr. Griffin had paid their tuition in exchange for their time. With Warehouse 13 funds. 

“Which brings us to the million dollar question,” Pete said, rubbing his hands together. “What was this Dr. Griffin looking for, anyway?” 

“A temple,” Rod said. “Buried treasure, booby traps, hieroglyphics… Indiana Jones stuff. She had it all down to almost the exact location, but she needed someone to go in and find it for her.”

“And that didn’t sound shady to you?” Myka asked. “Because it sounds to me like she made you do all the dangerous work while she sat back and made a profit.” 

John rolled his eyes. “Of course it was shady. Who cares? It was an adventure, and we could make a fortune. She didn’t know for sure what was in there, so what was stopping us from pocketing some stuff and selling it ourselves? That’s not just my college, that’s my sister’s, too, and my mom out of debt…”

“Right, you weren’t gonna do so bad yourselves,” Pete said. “So what happened?”

The three boys looked at each other for a long moment, and it was obvious that none of them was exactly sure. John finally spoke up.

“She told us it was over. We weren’t supposed to make phone calls, but she would email us, right? She emailed us and told us to call.”

Rod said, “It was weird. She’d just given us more cash for supplies, and then she started saying she was wrong, and we should get outta there. Keep the cash, keep whatever we wanted, but stop digging, don’t touch another damn thing, and go home.”

“Go home to your mothers,” John murmured. “That’s what she told us.”

 

 

“Was the little one better at camp today?” Helena asked between bites of leftover meatloaf. 

Thorndike smiled. “Yes, she was. She loved having a drawing from me with her. Thank you.”

“I used to write my Christina letters, once she learned how to read well. We were apart rarely, but for long stretches when we were. When I went back in time, I found her abed and reading the letter I’d sent her to Paris with. ” Helena dragged her fork through a puddle of gravy, murmuring, “I’d have left one for Myka, had I been able to write.” 

She set her plate aside and leaned back in her chair. Thorndike made no effort to speak, so she turned her attention to the window behind his desk. It was nearly seven in the evening, but sunlight was still clawing through the blinds, soupy gold and warm where it laid bars across her skin. She flexed her broken hand gently on the armrest of her chair. When she got restless, she swallowed hard and uncrossed her legs.

“Did Dr. Calder stay for dinner?” 

Thorndike cocked his head and answered slowly. “No. Why?”

“She’d been travelling. There was a valet ticket on her medical bag. Airport food is rarely any kind of wonder, and so I thought perhaps the two of you discussed what was distressing her over dinner.”

“Helena,” Thorndike said, “what I talk about with Dr. Calder is between her and me. It’s not…”

“What’s wrong at the Warehouse?”

Thorndike shut his eyes and sighed. She was pushing it, Helena knew, but she wouldn’t stop.

“Was someone injured? Artie? I know they’re attached, in some fashion.”

“I cannot discuss the status of Dr. Calder’s patients with you, you know that.”

“She has a patient,” Helena said. “Must have been serious to shake her that way.”

“Helena…”

“She discussed whatever it was with you. Hardly professional, I’d say.”

“Dr. Calder and I are both medical professionals, and she was given permission to ask me for advice,” Thorndike snapped. “I’m not going to talk with you about this any more, Helena; you’re prying things out of me. Stop.”

For a moment, Helena held his eyes, searched his face for some last scrap of information before he shut her down. He had dragged words out of her like magic over these past weeks, stories she had never told, memories she had locked away. People she had left behind. She waited for the words she needed, but they didn’t come. He knew, surely he knew, why she was asking.

“Just tell me that Myka’s alright.”

Thorndike pleaded, “I can’t…”

“Damn it, Thorndike, I cannot lose her! She’s the only foothold I have in this world.”

“I know.” 

“How could you know? She looked at the wretched monster I’d become and saw me, the woman I had been, could have been. She’s a necromancer, a hero. She is the one good thing.”

“You really don’t think there’s anything else worthwhile here?” 

Helena answered, “I read a newspaper today. Did you know I’d been to the Gulf of Mexico? More than once. Quite nicely wrecked now, oil everywhere. And that was only the first thing I found. Everywhere I turn, there’s something dying. The stupid persistence of life, our desperation to exist, and all it brings is destruction! It has to stop.”

“Helena…”

Her skin was burning with a cold that lanced up from her bones. Ice grated against the inside of her veins, cracked and split her cell by cell, and her throat closed up over a keening whimper. She raged against the pain. 

“It’s useless, it’s all useless! I knew the world I’d come to would be different, but I never dreamed it could get worse!”

Thorndike wasn’t raising his voice to match hers, and she barely heard him when he told her, “Helena, I need you to take a breath and…”

“No!” Helena slammed her uninjured fist on his desk and stood. “I’ve had enough! Haven’t you? Haven’t we all? How much more can we be expected to bear? When does it stop?”

“Not when you say it does.” 

“You’re wrong! It could end right here, right now, and what could you do? What could you ever do to stop it?” 

Thorndike surged up then, shouting, “Enough!” 

Helena stumbled back, utterly silenced. Thorndike was shaking. When he rounded the desk, Helena moved out of his way without breaking eye contact. Her fury dissolved, fear weighed her stomach like a stone. That was the core of it always, wasn’t it? She wanted to tell him that, but she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t read him, couldn’t think, couldn’t… 

Thorndike left the office door hanging open behind him. 

 

 

It was four in the morning when Tierra called him, whispering into the phone, “She’s awake.” 

Helena had survived the long hour she’d been left alone, between when Thorndike had fled and Tierra had arrived for an emergency shift. She had found Helena, she reported, in one of the rocking chairs on the front porch, clutching her locket and staring up at the stars. As instructed, Tierra had kept her distance, watching the woman through the waiting room window as the rocking of the chair slowed and Helena slumped sideways into a doze, from which she stirred at every passing car. 

Now she was curling her legs underneath her, huddled against the early morning cold, and running her uninjured hand through her hair. Thorndike shuffled out of his front door in his house shoes and plaid pajamas.

“Tea?” he asked, pouring a cup into the lid of a thermos.

Helena took it in both hands, but without quite looking away from the sky as she reached out. She sipped it and held it close to her body. God she looked cold. Thorndike leaned against the porch railing at the corner of her vision.

“Will they be here soon, then?”

Thorndike crossed his arms and asked, “Who?”

“The Regents.”

Jesus Christ, Thorndike thought, She’s just waiting. 

She drank her tea and looked past him, unfocused, like she could dissolve herself in the distance and leave only a body behind to be hauled away. No tether, no foothold in this world. 

“I didn’t call the Regents, Helena,” he told her, and the particles of her that had drifted away snapped back home. The look she gave him, when she looked him in the eyes at last, was incredulous. And Thorndike almost laughed, he was so happy not to have lost her. 

“I’m not going to call the Regents. Ever. You’re safe here.”

She shivered then, and whimpered, “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” 

“I know.” 

Thorndike knelt down, put a hand on Helena’s chair for balance, and she didn’t flinch away. She sobbed, so hard and suddenly she spilled that last of her tea, and somewhere in the mess of crying she started talking about what she was afraid of. 

“When I was first unbronzed,” she began, “all of my skin fell off in the shower of a hotel. In scales and ribbons and rags, and it was incredible. I thought it was a sign, that the world had changed, wasn’t so rotten as James had made it seem. And if it was… If it was, then I was the harbinger of change, and I would bring it in my wake.”

She ran a hand through her hair. Her tears had stopped, and she let them dry on her face without wiping them away. 

“I was wrong. It was meaningless, just the ravages of machines on men, and all for nothing. I am the same monster I was. Everything I love dies, and how can I bring anything but misery…“

“I’m not miserable.” 

Helena stopped, sniffed, and choked on a laugh. Thorndike rocked the chair gently with his hand.

“Thing is, Helena, you’re talking about symbols and change with a transgender man. And honey, I did puberty twice to get this gorgeous facial hair.” 

She glanced down at him, smiled and shook her head. 

“It never stops. I can’t watch tv ever without somebody making a joke about me, and there’ll be a nasty joke on my tombstone, because that’s the way things are. But I got things going for me now that I didn’t, and things changed.”

“You didn’t.”

“Neither did you. You’ll fight this forever, get like this, get angry, read the newspaper. But you can have more than one good thing.” 

Thorndike stood again and poured Helena another cup of tea from the thermos. She looked him in the eye, now, and she was trying to smile. A moth was pinging against the glass of the porch light, and Thorndike watched it while Helena drank, then unfolded herself from the rocking chair and served herself more tea. When she settled, her limbs filled the space her ego commanded, and she studied the moth with him, then turned her attention to the first bird swooping up into the sky, dragging navy up to mingle with the black. 

“I can’t decide if it’s late or early,” she murmured. 

“She’s fine,” Thorndike told her. “They’re all fine, I swear.”

Helena’s lips tugged upward, and she stretched until her muscles shook. 

“I wish there were something to do at this unholy hour. Sunrise is too far off to simply wait for it.”

Thorndike shrugged. “There’s always Waffle House.”

 

 

He tucked a note under his middle child’s pillow telling them to look after their sister, and he kissed the little one’s head. His shoes felt sleepy, and he tiptoed in them more carefully than he needed to, as if he could wake the house itself. Out on the porch, Helena waited in her jacket. When Thorndike opened the door, she turned to him with an expression he’d never seen before: glee.

“The trident,” she said. “I can’t feel it calling. It let me go!”

And she turned on her heel and skipped away, down the porch steps and into the early morning.


	5. Sick Leave

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: anesthesia

            The Warehouse was always quieter early in the morning, before Artie woke up. Myka watched it, bathed in yellow light from impossibly old light bulbs, crackling in places like an old dog whining in its sleep. She leaned farther over the balcony railing and snapped pictures of every visible detail for her eidetic memory to store.

            _It’s only six weeks_ , she reminded herself, _tops. The surgery’s nothing, you’re young, you’re healthy. It’ll all be over soon, and you can get back to normal._

            But something else gnawed at the back of her mind, growing ever louder as her screaming fear of death receded. Dr. Calder had agreed, after weeks of debate and negotiation, to remove Myka’s ovaries while they were still healthy, on the condition that Myka be off duty and away from the Warehouse, with its stresses and magics, for the duration of the operation and recovery. Myka had agreed.

            Now, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking down at this endless wonder for the last time.

            The computer in Artie’s office pinged, and on the floor above, Myka could hear him start to grumble and stir. A spark licked across the nearest aisle. Myka opened up the flashing alert on the computer monitor and started reading. It was odd, certainly, but not dangerous, which meant it would find itself on top of the massive slush pile that had accumulated over the past two months. On the trail of HG’s boys, Pete and Myka had been sent to Alam Nafaza in Egypt, where they’d spent days cataloguing every piece of camp equipment left behind and preparing it for shipment and testing at the Warehouse. Any part of it, Artie insisted, could be a clue about HG’s intentions, an illicit tool used to speed the digging process, or an artifact created from the sheer malevolence of the woman’s influence. Then, Myka and Pete had been sent back to test Regent-installed security measures around the newly re-hidden Warehouse 2. Claudia had been kept busy improving on their designs, and really, there hadn’t been a lot of other work happening around here. Myka didn’t like the thought of Pete having to handle so many cases, one after another, all on his own. But then, she thought, there wouldn’t be two months of backlog if she hadn’t…

            “You do understand that being on sick leave means you’re supposed to leave, right?”

            Myka swung her desk chair around to face Artie, who was almost smiling at her. A miracle, for six thirty in the morning.

            “Right,” she said. “I was just, you know, taking a look at this ping we got and…”

            “Myka,” Artie said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “The Warehouse will go on without you. You do what you need to do.”

            His hair was still pressed flat on one side, his beard was untrimmed, and there was sleep in his eyes. He yawned like a stout old bear, then shooed Myka out of his chair and settled down to work. Myka took one last mental picture before she left.

 

 

Kelly smiled when she passed Myka on her way out of the B&B, and Myka tried to smile back at her. But she’d been sitting in Helena’s chair at the breakfast table, and she obviously hadn’t been told that the walls weren’t as thick here as Pete had originally thought. (Don’t think about walls; don’t think about sex; don’t think about Helena. Helena’s gone.)

            “Time to go?” Pete asked.

            He followed Myka upstairs, picking up her bags and doing a terrible impression of a New York City bellhop. Myka picked up Pete the ferret, who licked her knuckles through the bars of the cage before giving an experimental nip.

            Helena would have let Myka carry her own bags. She would have waited in the car, knowing Myka needed to do these last things herself, to leave completely under her own power. A touch, a tug on a curl (Myka had a hair straightener at her parents’ house that she intended now to use), a gentle kiss if no one was looking, would have been Helena’s only input.

            Helena wouldn’t have tried to tell her that everything would be fine. Her silent presence at the edge of disaster might have made Myka believe that everything would be.

            (Nothing had ever been fine. And Myka had known that all along, hadn’t she? Had tasted it on Helena’s tongue, had felt it in the magnetism of Helena’s touch, pulling her closer and pushing her away when Helena switched back and forth between friend and foe. But she hadn’t said a word, and now it was too late. Helena wasn’t here, and nothing would ever be fine.)

            “I’m driving,” Myka told Pete, seizing her one last moment of control.

 

 

            Thorndike’s session ended more than twenty minutes late, and he was never more grateful that Holly knew better than to allow anyone to interrupt him when his door was closed. But from the back yard, he could hear his little daughter begging Holly to push her on the swing, which meant Lee Mai, the middle child, was left to man the desk and pester Helena. She had been here for two months, and until now, Thorndike had managed to keep her and his family from crossing paths; what Helena would tell Lee Mai about herself was anyone’s guess. The need to intervene made him forgetful, and he left the black orb that was balancing on an oven mitt out on his desk, the spidery metal glove on his hand, and rushed to the office door. What he found in the waiting room made him draw up short.

            Helena was lounging in a waiting room chair, only her eyes belying her alertness, the fact that she could make any gesture between letting one hand reach out as gentle as a breeze and lunging headlong into a brawl. She glanced up when Thorndike stepped into the room, but he waved her attention away. She returned her eyes to the battered pre-calculus textbook in her lap.

            Lee Mai was sitting cross-legged on the floor, punching buttons on a calculator and gnawing a pencil. They scribbled something in a notebook, then held it up, wincing, for Helena’s approval.

            “Good job!” Helena exclaimed, snapping the textbook shut.

            Lee Mai lowered the paper, staring from Helena to Thorndike and back again with the look of someone who had just avoided being struck by lightning. Then they pointed to Helena and said, “She just taught me math! Can she come to dinner?”

            Helena was clutching at her hair and starting to make her apologies, but Thorndike held up a hand and answered, “We’ll see.”           

            When he held the office door open wide, Helena handed the textbook to Lee Mai and stepped inside. Thorndike was prepared for a conversation about dinner, but Helena’s eyes alighted on the contraption on his desk instead.

            “What is that?” she asked, hands reaching out to it instantly, and really, a Warehouse agent should know better than to touch. Thorndike just managed to stop her before she burned her fingers on the overheated orb.

            “It’s… classified, actually. But you’re not gonna let me alone about it, so take a look.”

            Thorndike held his hand out, palm up, so Helena could see the little dial at the center of the glove. When he ran his finger clockwise along the dial, the orb on the desk split in half and rotated, meshing together with a zip of blue light and a smell of ozone.

            “Turn around and imagine me, over in that corner,” he instructed, and Helena obeyed.

            Again, she moved forward with her hand out when Thorndike materialized before her eyes.

            “Don’t touch!” Thorndike barked, and the voice issued from both Thorndikes at once. Helena’s head ping-ponged back and forth between them.

            “It’s a hologram,” he explained, and it was like listening to himself talk on the radio, the delay in transmission just enough to be distracting. “If you touch it, the image becomes solid. I teleport, basically. Rough on the old bones, not a good idea.”

            Thorndike stroked the dial counter-clockwise, and the hologram dissolved into the orb, which rotated and snapped shut again. He pulled the glove off and settled it into a drawer in his desk.

            “And what purpose does this little wonder serve?” Helena asked as she knelt down to examine the projector orb.

            “I’m the only psychiatrist the Regents have, and I serve every person who encounters an artifact and needs my help to recover. Need being the Regents’ decision, not mine. If it were my choice, I’d have done something for Claudia Donovan, but…” Thorndike shrugged. “There are newer versions available for Regents, so they can travel to the Warehouse in the event of an emergency, and Vanessa has one, too. Those versions don’t make it feel like you got chewed up and spit out between points A and B. Mrs. Frederick’s usually the one who imagines the Regents up for the trip.”

            “And is this how she travels, as well?”

            Thorndike laughed. “No one knows how _she_ does it.”

            For a while, Helena just crouched on the floor, walking her fingers through the air around the device, rotating the oven mitt underneath it to see the other sides, and jerking her right hand to the side in search of paper and pen before remembering that there was none. Thorndike wondered what uses she was imagining for it, the stories she was writing in her mind. She nodded decisively, a few minutes later, and stood.

            “This could come in very handy,” she mused aloud, “once I’ve gone. Emergency use only, of course, but…”

            At some point, Thorndike thought, this day would have to stop surprising him.

            “Gone where?”

            Helena looked at him like he was a dim-witted little boy, then, a mix of pity and vanity that he imagined would rub a lot of people the wrong way. Even he had to admit that it wasn’t her best feature. All he could do in response was sit and wait for her to tell him what oh-so-obvious fact he’d missed that her brilliant mind hadn’t. She scoffed at his silence.

            “Honestly Harper, did you imagine I’d stay for dinner? Play house with your family, and become a healthy, productive citizen? There are days recently when I nearly believe I’m not a monster, but have you truly forgotten that I am a _criminal_?”

            When he didn’t answer, Helena put her hands on his desk and leaned close to him. He remembered a story she’d told him, about Christina running to her with a bleeding bird in her hands, and how she had taught her daughter about death. She must have looked like this, then, gentle and quiet and still.

            “You’ve done your job, darling,” she told him, trying to soothe. “You saved my life, you neutralized the threat I posed, you behaved as a professional of the highest caliber in a desperate situation with stakes higher than you could have imagined. You’ve done all of it in service of the world, the Warehouse, the Regents, and no one can deny that. But the moment you allow your loyalty to shift, you become an accomplice, and you can be punished if you’re discovered. I won’t allow that to happen. You’ve done so much for me, Harper, and I have nothing to offer you but that I go before I cause you harm.”

            “This sounds like a letter,” he told her.

            She laughed and studied the scar on her right hand. “It was going to be, sometime soon. A day more, maybe two, but I cannot allow myself to linger.”

            Thorndike shook his head, insisting, “You can’t leave, Helena. We’re not finished. My loyalty is to my patients first, and I can’t in good conscience…”

            Helena stepped back, twisting the ring on her finger and shaking her head.

            “It seems Dr. Calder was correct in fearing that your attachment was unprofessional. The risk you’re proposing to take for me is ludicrous, Harper, and you know that!”

            “Dr. Calder doesn’t know everything.”

            “And what doesn’t she know?” Helena challenged. “What has she missed that makes this foolishness rational?”

            She was in the middle of the room now, a turn and two long strides from saying goodbye and vanishing. Thorndike could spend the rest of his days hunting for her, and if he found her, ever, that might actually be worse; he could lead the Regents straight to her. He had to keep her here. It was the only solid chance he had left. Helena’s eyebrow was raised, her arms were crossed, and she wouldn’t wait forever.

            “My attachment to you is unprofessional,” he said, “because I knew you were sick from the first time we met. I knew you were lying about being okay, and I let you do it. I lied to the Regents about you because you’re charming and brilliant, and you deserve to be free, and if I told the truth they would put you back in bronze. I should have fought for you, should have made them listen to me like a goddamn professional because they asked for my professional opinion, but I couldn’t stand to take the chance because I liked you. I screwed up, and it almost got you killed.”

            Helena’s hand was around her locket, and her mouth was open to protest, but Thorndike put a hand up to silence her.

            “You gave me another chance. I’m gonna give you one, too, a real fighting chance. You’re not alone, and you don’t have to run.”

            For a while, Helena looked dizzy, and Thorndike felt it. He sank into his desk chair, looking helpless while Helena opened her mouth, closed it, swallowed, and stood gaping again.

            “Right,” she finally gasped out. “So, when is dinner, then?”

 

 

            “So we’re talking food, right, which is a conversation I’m totally into,” Pete said, ribbing Myka until she slapped his elbow away and snarled about not harassing the driver. “And then she just asks, you know. I haven’t really been this serious with anybody in… I dunno, a while. And it’s exciting, right? I mean, I don’t know what I’m gonna tell Kelly, but the idea’s nice. It’s getting to the point where it sucks being in bed alone.”

            For Myka, being stuck in a car with someone who was so damn gaga over a girl was like watching another kid eat cookies without her, but she thumped her head on the headrest and told herself to focus. Pete needed someone to talk to, and the fact that it hurt was no one’s fault but her own.

            It was hard, though, to fight off the memory of her first nights without Sam, the ones when the bed had refused to warm up, the room had been so enormous that just crossing it from the light switch to the mattress felt impossible, and she had slept in his shirts and woken up confused, smelling him close to her. She had felt weightless in the morning, like without him to hold her she would float away.

            “But what do you think?” Pete asked, and Myka risked taking her eyes off the road to glance at him. She hoped it would help her stay in the car with him instead of wandering off into her own head.

            “About you moving in with Kelly?” she asked, just in case she’d lost the thread of the conversation.

            “Well yeah. I mean, is that even kosher, Warehouse-wise?”

            “There’s nothing in the manual about it,” Myka said. “And it’s not like the Warehouse can tell you not to be happy.”

            Pete tugged on his seatbelt and squirmed.

            Myka raised an eyebrow at him and asked, “You are happy, right?”

            “What? Yeah! It’s just… a big deal. I don’t want to screw it up.”

            He grinned at her, and Myka wanted to cry.

            “You won’t screw it up, Pete,” she told him. “And I’m glad you’re happy. You deserve it.”

            _And I deserve this_ , she didn’t add, and she hoped Pete couldn’t see it on her face. Then again, he usually had to ask what she was thinking, even when he had a vibe. Not like Helena. She would know.

            “What’s up, Mykes? You’re all quiet,” Pete said, and oh god, maybe he did know. Myka tried to look confused, to smile, and to change lanes at the same time, and the expression she produced must have been utter chaos, but Pete just squeezed her shoulder and laughed. “You sad there won’t be any Jack and Rebecca ending for us?”

            He made kissy faces at her, and Myka finally managed that smile.

            “God, Pete, I can’t drive safely and gag at the same time!”

            “Oh come on, I know you guys did the girl bonding thing. She found Jack’s engagement ring, and you two were in the room together mooning over the romance. And don’t tell me you didn’t think about it when we used the time machine, and she said she and Jack woke up kissing!”

            Myka rolled her eyes, and Pete laughed, and maybe during her time off Myka would have a chance to swing through Saint Louis and visit Rebecca’s grave. God, there were too many dead people on her mind today.

            The Colorado Springs exit came up on their left. Pete watched her hit the turn signal and drive on autopilot all the way home, but if he was thinking anything, he kept it to himself.            

            There were no guns allowed in the Bering household, so Myka’s service weapon was locked in its case in the trunk. She dumped her two suitcases and Pete the ferret in his travel cage in her parents’ guest room. In the bathroom, she showered, and she left her watch and her badge on the counter. She drove herself to the hospital, but she handed the keys over to Pete when she’d parked, and after a certain point, she left him behind, too.

            In the course of her work, she’d strode through several hospitals, questioned doctors, nurses, patients, and weeping family members. She’d curled up in chairs that always had a film of cleaning agent on them, watching over injured partners while the scent of disinfectant and overcooked vegetables stifled her. There was that time in New York, after her brush with Man Ray’s camera, where she’d almost died in a place like this. But she had never had surgery before. And without her gun, her badge, her partner, is was harder to convince herself that it would all work out in the end.

            Dr. Calder checked her vitals, made sure she’d eaten nothing all day, and then asked her to change into a hospital gown. By the time the anesthesia started running through Myka’s veins, there wasn’t much left of Agent Bering but her underwear and Rebecca’s words drifting through her nervous thoughts.

            _Get out of here while you still have time, while you have a life to live. This place… it’ll use you up._

Almost gone, she curled her hand against her chest, as if she could cling to a locket that wasn’t there.

 


	6. Claudia

            “Your heart sold,” Lee Mai announced, making themself at home on the attic floor beside Helena.

            Helena leaned over their shoulder to see the computer screen they were pointing at. With assistance from Lee Mai, she’d started selling mechanical trinkets on ebay, partly for the money and partly so she would have something to do. The auction for her life-sized beating heart had just ended, and the final offer was staggering.

            “Two thousand dollars? Honestly?”

            “I still think that thing is gross,” Lee Mai said, “but the money sure ain’t. He sent us an email, said he’s a cardiologist in San Diego.”

            They opened the message for Helena to read. Helena muttered, “Two thousand dollars,” over and over again all the way through before she laughed and turned back to her work.

            “How did you come up with that thing anyway?” Lee Mai asked. “I mean, you think it’s cool, I got that, but why would you even think to make a human heart, out of all the stuff you do?”

            Helena smiled, explaining, “I spent a great deal of time exploring biology, particularly in the years when I was writing _The Island of Doctor Moreau_. Electricity, however, was limited. I studied it, of course, but there was so little known about it, and so little available to experiment with, even at the Warehouse, that I could only do so much. Most of my time was spent attempting to understand why artifacts give off an electric charge, and I never made much headway on it. In this century, though, I had a great deal to learn. Electricity is everywhere, even in our bodies. There are people in this world walking around with electric hearts in their chests, of all things! I was fascinated.”

            “Okay,” Lee Mai said, staring. “And now I’m thinking you could make anything awesome.”

            “Even pre-calculus?”

            Lee Mai groaned and fell onto their back on the floor. When they didn’t move for almost a minute, Helena shrugged and assumed they would stay there. She started twirling gears inside her latest toy, a train run with the candle-powered steam engine she’d designed. One of the little pieces kept slipping somehow, and it was such a pleasurable frustration to have a puzzle to solve.

            “So this is way more money than you’re giving to my dad, and the toy making pays for itself,” Lee Mai stated after a few minutes had passed. One of their legs swung awkwardly as they sat up, and Helena barely rescued the delicate dismantled half of her train. “What are you gonna do with what’s left over? Books, clothes…” Lee Mai picked up Helena’s steel screwdriver and tossed it from hand to hand. “Maybe some tools that aren’t a hundred years old?”

            Helena tried to scowl, but Lee Mai flashed a ridiculous grin.

            “I’m sending it to the Warehouse.”

            “How?”

            “Well, James McPherson and I were able to steal a great deal of money from the Warehouse without anyone noticing, and that by illicit channels that James opened while he had access to the Warehouse computers. To this day the Regents don’t seem to understand how he managed that. Your father has a legal account with the Warehouse, and from it he receives his salary. I can run that account backwards and begin filtering money back into the Warehouse coffers fairly easily. Small amounts, timed to his weekly withdrawals—it should be essentially undetectable.”

            Lee Mai looked skeptical, but Helena was certain there could be no trouble. Even if anyone did notice the financial variance, they’d blame the computers long before they ever suspected HG Wells.

            On Monday, the money started leaking in. Across the country, a computer pinged.

 

 

            Claudia had fallen asleep upright on her bed, her guitar slung across her lap. Artie was letting her go on retrievals because he needed extra hands, but never, never alone with Pete. This meant more Artie time than was healthy for anyone. Even better, the two months of backlog was still gumming up the works after two months of trying to catch up, and the gooery hadn’t gotten flushed on time thanks to a dicey retrieval that had taken her, Artie, and Pete three days longer than expected to complete. They found Leena knee-deep in neutralizer, bailing excess into every container she could find, including every dish at the B&B. And every dish had to be washed by hand, twice, by order of Artie, to avoid wacky neutralizer ingestion shenanigans.

            Which, of course, had happened anyway. To Pete.

            “I’ve seen things,” was all he would tell Claudia.

            Artie made them wash every single dish all over again.

            Pete being locked in his room for a day while he… saw things, and then grounded until Artie was sure he was back to normal, resulted in a mess for Leena to deal with, as it always did when Pete was stuck at home with no one to keep an eye on stuff like where he left his dirty socks and how much cereal he spilled on the counter. Plus the fact that he hacked a nightstand in half with a fireman’s hatchet at some point during the day of wackness.

            The Warehouse was cranky when Leena didn’t come in to work and do whatever it is she did on Tuesdays, and a cranky Warehouse was always a joy.

            God, they all missed Myka.

            Claudia had decided the night before that she might miss Myka less if she jammed for a while, so she’d threaded a sock (one of Pete’s, but clean, thank god) under the strings to muffle the noise and practiced for a few hours. She got in the zone, and the quiet thud of muted music was so soothing, and Claudia didn’t get good sleep on the best of days, and there hadn’t been a best of days in a while.

            It was eight in the morning when her computer murmured, “Hello, friend,” in the purring mechanical voice of a _Portal_ android. And after she’d stopped shrieking, she wondered if a computer could really murmur anything when it was at full volume.

            “Claud!” Pete shouted, banging on the door, and Claudia jumped again before she got out of bed and answered.

            “I’m fine,” she said before he could even ask. “It was just an alarm, and I kinda didn’t notice the falling asleep part. Sorry.”

            Pete took a deep breath of relief, then looked at her again. “Right, well, you want to hit the Warehouse with me? I mean, after you wash the drool off your face.”

            Claudia wiped her chin with the back of her hand and rolled her eyes. “Screw it. I’m gonna take a shower and catch a ride with Leena later. See ya.”

            “See ya,” Pete echoed, and he left.

            By the time she realized what the alarm meant, Pete was already out the door.

            Somehow, Leena had convinced Artie to drop the old bone of HG Wells in favor of managing the disaster he’d let the Warehouse become. Claudia had transferred all searches to her laptop, where they ran in the background and turned up nothing and nada for weeks on end.

            Now, Claudia slid into her desk chair and pulled up the search apps, muttering, “Hello, friend indeed.”

            Account tracking, the alert declared, just like before. But instead of “internal funds accessed,” it said only “financial discrepancy.” Priority 5 protocol, even less important by Warehouse standards than the original theft alert. Claudia only pursued it to make sure no one she lived with was losing pay.

            The disrupted account was a pay channel, directed to Harper Thorndike, and Claudia recognized that name. She didn’t get vibes, but she imagined she was developing something like Myka’s instincts, an ability to sense when there was more information to be found.

            She found Thorndike’s name in the Warehouse manual, chapter 112, section F, paragraph four: Warehouse psychiatrist.

            And the funny thing was, there was money flowing both ways through his account.

            Claudia pursued the money trail as far as she could, which meant only forwards, not backwards. The amount froze at under five bucks exactly five minutes after eight, and it slipped from Thorndike’s account and landed in the same account that Wells and McPherson had hacked. From there, Claudia started tracking Thorndike himself, and by lunch, she’d found prescriptions written by Thorndike, dating back to three weeks after HG had disappeared, for a woman named Victoria Charles.

 

 

            “You’re late,” Artie barked the second the umbilicus door closed, and he turned his seat, scolding all the way, but when he was facing Claudia, he stopped.

            Granted, she would probably stare at her, too. She hadn’t showered, or changed her clothes, or seen a mirror since yesterday, and she’d slept upright against a wall, so her hair was probably amazing in the back. And he stared at her, and she didn’t know what to say. That had never shut her up before, though, so she started talking.

            “There’s this… this friend I have from, before. I think she’s sick. I need to go find her.”

            Artie leaned forward. “Before what? Find her? Sick? Sick how? Go now?”

            Claudia nodded and started off with a lie. “From the institution. She tried to kill herself. She’s nuts, right? Maybe I should just not get involved, it’s a mess, but I have a lot of stuff I need to ask her, and she’s my friend, you know? I mean, she might be my friend. I just… I need to know. I don’t know what to do if I don’t know.”

            Artie was gaping like a fish, and Claudia watched the way her shoe bent when she pressed her toes into the floor.

            “Can I have a couple days off, I guess is what I’m asking. And like a ride to the airport.”

            “Sure,” Artie said, sitting up. “I’ll take you tonight, have all the time you need.”

            Claudia packed clothes for three days and smuggled her tesla through airport security.

 

 

            Helena looked on in horror as the children squirted the contents of little bottles of pigment into her perfect frosting, and Harper couldn’t keep from laughing.

            “It’s revolting!” the woman wailed as the colors cut through the creamy white and left trails of red, yellow, and an ever-spreading stain of orange.

            “It’s yummy!” little Clea declared, squirming when Lee Mai stopped her from dipping her fingers in the frosting.

            Helena scowled, insisting, “That recipe has been absolutely perfect for the past two hundred years. My mother gave me that recipe, it’s the only thing I can properly cook, and you’re adding pigmented chemicals to it like it’s a bloody abstract painting! No food looks like that.”

            Lee Mai snickered and said, “Pretty sure pumpkins look like this, Hel.”

            Helena glared at them. It only made them laugh harder.

            “It tastes the same,” Harper told Helena, trying to reassure.

            “If you close your eyes,” Lee Mai added, and Harper shoved their shoulder.

            Clea managed to plunge her hand into the frosting while her sibling was off balance. She’d been begging to make Halloween cookies for days, and it was weeks until Halloween yet, but when would that ever stop her? Helena had sculpted cookie cutters shaped like cats and bats, because she’d been informed that such things were traditional, and then the kids had decided that the cookies really wouldn’t do unless they were chocolate, because bats and cats are black, and Helena hadn’t missed a beat in all the chaos. She really was a wonder with kids. But then Clea had insisted that the frosting be orange, because when that little girl decided to do something, she went whole hog.

            Which was probably why she’d taken a fistful of orange glop instead of the standard finger scoop. Helena swooped in, carrying her from the counter to the sink and holding her up to wash her hands off.

            “Silly fish, you’ll make yourself too sick for cookies if you eat all that!” Helena told her, and while she was talking, Clea stuck a frosting-covered finger in Helena’s mouth.

            Harper watched Helena stiffen, then slump her shoulders in defeat. Her eyes were closed, but Harper could still see them roll. Clea giggled and started washing her hands. When they returned to the mixing bowl, Helena dipped her finger in and sucked the frosting off in a sulk.

            The doorbell rang, and Harper announced, “I’ll get it,” and left the room against his better judgment. Helena had the wickedest grin on her face now, and if she started a frosting fight with the kids, so be it. The pictures would be adorable.

            When he opened the door, his blood ran cold.

            “Hi. Claudia Donovan, Warehouse 13. Is Victoria Charles here?”

            “No, she’s not,” Harper said, as loudly as he thought he could get away with.

            Lee Mai heard and started shushing everyone in the kitchen. Harper tried to close the door. Claudia Donovan put her arm against the door, her foot on the threshold.

            “How about HG Wells?”

            Clea shouted for her daddy from the kitchen. Lee Mai tried to shush her. Claudia resisted his second attempt to shut the door. Harper shoved her backward.

            “Get out!” he roared.

            Helena was running already. Good. Fuck. Running out the back. Claudia Donovan would go out back, too. He needed to find Helena. Should have let Donovan come through the front. Fuck.

            Harper snapped, “Clea, upstairs, now!” and tried to think straight.

            “Dude, chill out!” Claudia said.

            She’d left the front door hanging open behind her. Thorndike hadn’t locked it. He could kick himself for that.

            Claudia put a hand on him. He ripped himself away.

            “This state has castle laws!” he yelled in her face, because she hadn’t stopped trying to look him in the eye. “I could shoot you for barging into my home like this. Who do you think you are?”

            “Would you just give me a second?” Claudia screamed back. “I’m not here to hurt her.”

            Harper’s eyes dropped to the tesla tucked into her belt. She drew it clumsily and threw it on the floor. God, she was just a kid. But that didn’t calm him down.

            “I swear,” Claudia said. “I just wanna know what’s going on. Is she okay?”

            “Well, she was,” Lee Mai muttered from the kitchen doorway. They scooped the abandoned tesla off the floor and glared.

            Harper tore at his hair. Even on foot, Helena could be too far-gone to find by now. She would call, eventually. But until then, what would she do? She could get hurt.

            “I have to find her,” he announced. He shoved Claudia aside and grabbed his car keys. “Watch her,” he told Lee Mai, and he stormed out.

 

 

            For a while, the kid just stood there, watching Claudia twitch. Then they tucked the tesla into the back of their pants, and Claudia realized this was a person who watched too much tv.

            “Give me your phone,” they demanded.

            “What is this, a hostage situation?” Claudia shot back.

            The kid gave her a look they must have picked up from HG, with the raised eyebrow and everything, and said, “Yeah, pretty much.”

            They held out their hand, and Claudia groaned and went fishing in her pockets. She handed over the Farnsworth, too, as a gesture of goodwill.

            “You’re Claudia, right? I’m Lee Mai. Singular they, and don’t screw it up.”

            Claudia held up her hands and said she knew the feeling. A timer dinged in the kitchen, and Lee Mai made Claudia walk in first.

            There were chocolate cookies on every inch of counter space, some of them frosted, and Lee Mai pulled a fresh sheet out of the oven. Claudia glanced around the rest of the kitchen while Lee Mai cleared the cookie sheet and slid another one, laden with unbaked cats and bats, into the oven. Even Pete couldn’t eat this many cookies.

            She noticed one at her feet, shattered, and a smear of orange frosting that tracked across the floor in what Claudia guessed was the direction of the rear exit. That sucked.

            “Do you want some sweet tea or something?”

            Lee Mai was staring at her again, scrutinizing. Claudia shrugged.

            “Sure, why not?”

            The kid fished a tall glass out of a cabinet above his, dammit, their head and filled it from a pitcher in the fridge. Claudia took it, drank, and coughed.

            “Sorry,” she rasped. “I forgot how serious Southerners are about sweetness.”

            Lee Mai filled a second glass with water and handed it over. Claudia thanked them for the hospitality, and Lee Mai gave her the HG look.

            Half an hour later, Dr. Thorndike called, and from the half of the conversation she heard, Claudia gathered that he was coming back with HG. As soon and they hung up, Lee Mai jerked open the freezer and started cracking a tray of ice cubes into a plastic bag. They piled cool cookies to make room for a cutting board on the counter, then shuffled through a crisper drawer in the fridge.

            “Dammit, all these lemons are bad!” They punctuated the sentence by flinging a browned and withered citrus past Claudia and into the sink.

            “Lemons?”

            Lee Mai rattled through a second drawer, sorting out the quick lemons from the dead, and said, “Yeah, when Helena gets triggered like that, she can get flashbacks real bad. We override it with strong, in-the-moment stimuli. Lemons, loud music, ice in the hand, stuff like that. Helps get her feet back under her. Works for intrusive thoughts and dissociation, too, sometimes. She hasn’t had a bad spell in ages, though, and it ain’t lemonade season, so…” They held up two hopeless lemons before gathering up the less terrible ones and juicing them into a cup. It was barely a mouthful all told, and Lee Mai swirled it in the cup and glared at it.

            “I really am sorry,” Claudia said.

            “I really don’t care.”

            Claudia didn’t try to say anything after that, just scuffed her toe on the linoleum and waited. She thought about the fact that it was warm here, even though the cold was already showing its fangs in Univille. There would probably be sun here all winter, long after it had started hiding itself below the horizon of the badlands at four thirty every day. That would be good, Claudia figured, for HG.

            Eventually, a car pulled up in the driveway, and a door on the other half of the house opened. Lee Mai picked up the ice and lemon juice and pointed with their elbow.

            “Sit on the couch and stay there,” they ordered, and Claudia obeyed. Not that she really thought it’d get her anywhere with this kid. Lee Mai slammed the front door behind them.

 

 

            The couch must have seen a million butts over the years, Claudia thought. Pinks and reds on the floral canvas had worn down to tan in a stripe along the center of each cushion, and the whole thing sagged. The carpet had faint trenches where people had walked, over and over every day, from the hall to the couch to the tv, the bookshelf, and to a round little table with four chairs that was covered with the half-finished chunks of a puzzle. A dozen kids’ games were stacked in a corner, with some stray pieces piled beside and on top. There was art all over the walls, and half of it involved either glitter or macaroni. Claudia looked at her hand, and there was glitter on her now, too.

            When she looked up again, there was a tiny tow-headed girl peering around the doorframe. She was looking somewhere a little over Claudia’s head. Claudia looked her in the eye, and she tiptoed forward, wide-eyed. The front door opened, Lee Mai barreled into the kitchen without even a glance in the living room.

            “I’m Clea. I’m four and a half.”

            The little girl was standing right in front of her now, with just the coffee table between them, and the sun gushing through the front windows lit her up like something Claudia recognized. She was squinting back at the little girl, trying to place this familiar feeling, when Lee Mai tromped in.

            “Stop staring, Clea!” they scolded, clapping a hand over the little girl’s eyes.

            They set a plate of frosted cookies on a coffee table book in front of Claudia while Clea squirmed and complained.

            “Stop putting food on top of the book!” Clea whined.

            “I didn’t!” Lee Mai said, then looked up at Claudia, explaining, “She’s an empath, thinks she knows everything.”

            Of course! Leena got that look sometimes, like the whole world was aligned for the perfect photo shoot of her. Claudia could never miss a chance to mess with Leena’s all-knowingness, and this kid looked like a lot of fun, too, so she slid the cookies off the book and onto the table as silently as possible. Lee Mai uncovered their sister’s eyes, proclaiming, “There, see?”

            Clea glanced at the table, then up at Claudia. No fooling her, then. When Claudia made a face, the little girl giggled and hopped up and down without looking away. Lee Mai covered her eyes with one hand and hauled her up, shrieking and kicking in glee, with an arm around her waist.

            An errant foot connected with Lee Mai’s thigh, and they grunted, saying, “Let’s run you ragged outside, okay? You can’t just stare at people, it’s rude.”

            Claudia picked up a cookie, took a bite, and almost choked at the sound of laughter. Somewhere in the melee, HG had appeared. She leaned against the wide living room doorframe and watched Lee Mai stagger out with their sister in arms and chuckled. She took a deep breath before she moved, crossed the room and pulled up a chair without looking at Claudia.

            If she hadn’t been so dumbstruck herself, Claudia might have called HG’s hunched shoulders and bowed head shy, or maybe ashamed. But Claudia hadn’t expected to be alone with her. Honestly, she’d imagined a grand scene like in the Boiling Point bottling plant in California, where Myka had put the pieces into place and announced the solution, her genius visible for an audience to see. Claudia would snap all the little pieces of HG together, and HG would either reveal her true evil like Dracula stepping out of the shadows (and Claudia would tesla her in a blaze of blue electric glory), or she would tear up with joy that someone at last understood, and they would embrace while the Thorndikes looked on and applauded.

            But she was here alone now, quiet and tense, in shouting distance of people who obviously loved her, and Claudia didn’t have a single bit of it figured out.

            HG’s hand darted out to grab a cookie like she expected Claudia to slap it. But Claudia was too nervous to actually notice anything. She had a bajillion questions, and they were all important, but she just sat there listening to HG snap bits off her cookie and chew until the woman finally spoke.

            “You gave me quite a fright today. I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

            Claudia told her tongue to apologize, but all she managed was, “Yeah.”

            “I have something for you,” HG said. “A few things, actually.”

            The first thing she held out was a static bag. Through the clear side, Claudia could see HG’s compact.

            “Safe to touch, should you choose to, but do not open it under any circumstances. It belonged to Lizzie Borden.”

            “That’s terrifying,” Claudia said, shoving the compact to the other end of the couch and edging away.

            HG went still, rubbed the scar on her right hand and stared at the carpet. It had been a gesture of not-evilness, Claudia knew that, and she’d ruined it. Whether or not it was a sincere gesture was a question for later, when she wasn’t suspended on the edge of sorry and scared and there weren’t piles of presents on HG’s lap.

            “What else?” Claudia asked, holding her hand out.

            HG huffed out a laugh, and it sounded like a badly strummed chord; the right note, but the vibe was all wrong. She stared out the window, fidgeting with her ring, then made a decision and passed Claudia a stack of papers. Claudia unfolded them on the coffee table: meticulous circuit board sketches, calculations, and, in someone else’s handwriting, what looked like basic code. There was an envelope, too, and when Claudia dumped it, pieces of electronic hardware scattered everywhere.

            “James McPherson attempted to hack into the Farnsworths, to interfere with the signals and cut off communication. Despite Artie’s insistence on the perfection of the device, I was able to successfully achieve what James had attempted. I thought perhaps you could have a look at all this and patch up some of the vulnerabilities. With a bit of experimentation, we might manage to make the little things impregnable.”

            “We?”

            “You,” HG corrected, without looking at Claudia.

            Claudia leaned back on the couch, almost grinning, and said, “You want to tinker together.”

            The way HG put her words together was so measured it was almost visible. “You are a brilliant young woman, and your capacities and expertise fascinate me. The things we might create together would be wondrous, indeed. But I hold no illusions,” she said, and here she looked, really looked at Claudia for the first time, “as to the likelihood of that. I’m giving you these things because I believe it would be valuable to see them completed, one way or another. I trust you to do them well.”

            And what was she supposed to say to that? Claudia rolled a piece of hardware around in her hands and shuffled her feet. HG cleared her throat and gave her the last of the papers in her lap.

            “This is a device I was…” she started, but Claudia burst in.

            “Dude, this looks like my mini tesla!” She splayed the papers out in a rush, all hesitancy forgotten, because this was the coolest thing ever. She ran her fingers over blueprints, studied every new twist on power generation HG had designed, muttering, “Oh wow, oh dude,” over and over. When she asked questions, HG answered, and they had their heads together for almost ten minutes before Claudia looked up again and saw something other than mad science excitement on HG’s face.

            “Claudia,” she began, “I know that I am undeserving of your trust, and I don’t ask it. I will however beseech you not to reveal my whereabouts, at least for the time being. Dr. Thorndike is taking a great risk in caring for me, and if I’m found here, there will be serious consequences for him. This home, his family, all of this was given to him by the Regents, and they can just as easily take it away. For his sake, for his children’s, please…”

            “Do me a favor?” Claudia asked, and HG stopped in her tracks. “Don’t mess with me.”

            HG opened her mouth to protest, every muscle rigid in defiance, and it took all the guts Claudia had to stand up to her, saying, “Look, either you’re evil, in which case you don’t give a crap about Thorndike, or you’re good, and you probably have some genius plan to protect him that has nothing to do with me. Either way, you’re not worried about him. You’re worried about you. So just… be straight with me, okay?”  

            There were tears building up in HG’s eyes, and Claudia was right back on the edge of panic. But HG chuckled again and said, “You’ve been picking up quite a bit from Myka, haven’t you?”

            She blinked, and the tears were gone. She dug the cookies out from under the mess of papers and asked Claudia if she agreed that orange frosting was just grotesque before snapping off an enormous bite of frosted cat. All Claudia could think was that she should have packed more clothes, because figuring this woman out was going to take forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My girlfriend has decided to make Halloween cookies. In March. I am well pleased with this chapter.


	7. New Guy

            “Myka is coming back!” Pete insisted, and Claudia wanted to puncture her eardrums.

            It was a discussion they’d all been having for a month now, and slowly, everyone except Pete had understood what was happening. Now, either Pete had a vibe, or he was just sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting “la la la,” because the fact was, Myka had been gone twice as long as she said she would be, and she was getting more and more distant every day.

            Artie barked at Pete to hold up his end of the enormous banquet table they’d just snagged in Ontario, and even so, they banged it into the umbilicus doorway. Between his mutterings about the to-do list they had for the day, Artie tried his best to explain to Pete for the hundredth time, “Myka has used up all her sick leave, and all of her vacation days, too, because you insisted that I give her just a _little_ more time.”

            “She’s sick!”

            The table slipped out of Artie’s grasp and slammed onto the floor. The entire office rattled. Claudia winced and grabbed a goo sprayer, just in case the thing started smelling like Christmas dinner, because Christmas dinner was way less delicious when it was an artifact meal that turned to worms in your mouth. She so did not want to deal with worms today.

            “Pete,” Artie groaned. “She’s not sick. Vanessa gave her a clean bill of health almost two months ago. I took your second suggestion and arranged a meeting for her with the psychiatrist, but she didn’t show for it. She has a disciplinary hearing in a week, and if she misses that, she will be terminated. Either way, we have _work_ to do. Now can we please just get this to the Warehouse floor so it can be tagged and done with?”

            A smell of fudge and figgy pudding wafted through the office, but Pete was so intent on his argument that he ignored it. He also ignored Claudia’s warning and the fact that she splattered neutralizer on his shirt; he barely ducked for the sparks.

            “So we’ll wait a week, and then things will be back to normal! I don’t need a new partner!”

            Claudia froze.

            “Wait, new partner? Since when are we getting a new partner?”

            “He is coming today,” Artie rumbled. “And we are going to welcome him like professionals!”

            Claudia asked, “So, if there’s a new guy, does that mean I’m not the junior agent anymore?”

            “You’re not an agent at all!” Artie shouted over Pete’s badgering. “Now, I need the winch and the flatbed set up for this monstrosity, there are artifacts to shelve, the FISH needs to be fixed, and all of this has to happen _today._ ”

            Pete called dibs on driving the flatbed, and Claudia consoled herself that after today, the new guy would be the one stuck fixing the FISH. She went to collect the safety gear, and when she came back, Artie was still standing in the middle of his office.

            “This is all Wells’ doing,” he said. “She came in here and she ripped us apart, and any moment now, she’ll strike!”

            “Dude, if she was gonna kick us while we’re down, don’t you think she kinda missed her window?”

            Artie glared at her, then shoved a stack of papers on his desk. They flew in all directions, and half of them landed in the puddle of purple goo Claudia had dripped on the floor.

            “She ruined us. This is her fault!”

           

 

            “This is _not_ your fault, HG,” Claudia said, and Helena thought she could hear annoyance through the phone. Granted, they’d had this conversation a dozen times or more since Helena had discovered there was a crisis. She combed her hair back from her face and let herself go through it one more time, hoping maybe this time she’d hear something that would help.

            “How in the world is this not my fault? I betrayed her, I used her, and then I abandoned her in the middle of a disaster. She knows now I was ill-intentioned, she’s seen how cruel the world can be, and I infected her with my parasitic despair. I poisoned everything.”

            Something clanged in the background on Claudia’s end, and she swore before interjecting, “First of all, depression is not contagious, you didn’t infect her with anything. Second, Myka has seen all kinds of shit, so I really doubt you’re the be-all end-all of her decision-making.”

            “The final straw, perhaps. I certainly added to her suffering, and hasn’t she had enough?”

            “Haven’t you?”

            Yes. That was the crux of it all, though Helena wasn’t quite prepared to explain it, least of all to a preoccupied nineteen-year-old over the phone. Myka’s trust, her affection, any friendship or love affair they could have had, was gone, and it was agony to know it. For Helena to have destroyed Agent Bering as well was too much for her to stand. Oscar Wilde kept creeping into her head, his sickly face after years in gaol, the bitterness he wrote of that Helena had then been only weeks away from tasting.

 

            _Yet each man kills the thing he loves_

_By each let this be heard._

_Some do it with a bitter look,_

_Some with a flattering word._

_The coward does it with a kiss,_

_The brave man with a sword!_

 

            “Look,” Claudia said, and Helena shook poetry out of her head. “You got out of the bronzer, and everything you did was geared toward survival. Honestly, I count you not getting hit by a car as a pretty big win. And I don’t know what it’s like to be you, but I know what it’s like to be desperate. My brother was in an inter-dimensional space for years, and I couldn’t get him out. I tried, but I was just a kid. There was absolutely nothing else I could have done.”

            Helena shook her head, saying, “What happened to your brother wasn’t your fault.”

            “Myka’s choices aren’t your fault, either. My point is, what in the hell could you have done, HG?”

            “I could have written to her,” Helena answered.            

            Claudia sighed and turned her attention to the FISH when Helena didn’t say anything else. Helena flexed her right hand, and the pain from that old injury fueled her self-loathing. It would ache like this forever on cold and rainy days, and that was her fault without question. So too the painful memory of standing helpless in front of Myka’s door, realizing she’d destroyed her writing hand, her only means of saying goodbye.

            Suddenly, Helena sat up straight, calling, “Claudia?” When the girl answered, she asked, “Could you help me with something?”

 

 

            Knowing something was true didn’t mean accepting it, and it sure as hell didn’t mean understanding it. Steve knew this. He also knew, based on the fact that it was barely two o’clock and two people were dead because something something Shakespeare, that it was going to be a long day.

            Pete’s company was only making it longer.

            “So now Myka has this ferret, right? And she pretends she doesn’t like him, but while I’m not looking, she builds, builds! this huge cage for him, with like tunnels and platforms and a little hammock. And she named him Pete, because see, she actually likes me, too. She’ll be all fiery and cranky when we see her, but it’s just how she shows her love. We call the ferret PJ, but it’s really more like PU.”

            He looked like a Labrador when he did that, turning to Steve openmouthed, waiting for him to laugh. They sat still for a beat before Steve said, “Ferrets stink. I get it.”

            Because by god, Pete could think he’s humorless and boring, but no one was going to think Steve was stupid. He might not be Myka, but he wasn’t stupid.

            Pete told him to park the car while he went in ahead, and Steve figured he wanted a minute with Myka. Something was up between those two, and his first guess was love. He’d seen enough straight people kissing, so Steve pulled up at the curb, let Pete hop out, and scanned the street for a parking space. By the time he realized this might take more than a minute, Pete was through the door of Bering & Sons.

 

 

            Any day now, Myka was going to get her gun out of her car and shoot that little bell by the cash register. It was the last thought she had, standing on tiptoe, straining to reach that damn top shelf, before turning around in a huff and coming face to face with Pete.

            “Ophelia, pray tell,” he said, with his face scrunched up in that stupid dramatic look, “How doth milady?”

            “Pete! I… What are you doing here?”

            He looked a little sheepish, saying, “We’re working a case up in Denver, and we could use a little help from the Bering department.”

            Myka felt uncertainty clamp around her throat, the kind of doubt that would pull the trigger too slowly, move the feet a second too late.

            “I can’t do that, Pete.”

            Something was supposed to come after that, some excuse or explanation, but it had been three months now, and all the excuses she had on hand had worn thin. Instead, she heaved a crate full of books onto the counter and shuffled through them to get a sense of where they should go.

            “Sure you can! I mean, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not even that big a deal, all we need is…”

            “No, I really really can’t.”

            Pete looked worried when she risked a glance, and Myka tried to flee with the crate. He put a hand on her arm. Myka refused to look up at him again, even when she could hear the tremor in his voice.

            “How bad is it? Are you gonna be okay?”

            Myka stared at the battered cover of a Thomas Wolfe novel in the book crate.

            “What’s going on, Mykes? Don’t make me poke you.”

            He had his finger aimed at her shoulder when she finally blurted, “I screwed up, Pete.”

            She heaved the crate of books off the counter and set off down an aisle with it. Pete pursued her.

            “What, with the Regents? They’ll get over it. You’re the best agent we have.”

            Myka didn’t look at him, but she answered honestly, “No I’m not. If I were, I would have been able to stop HG Wells! Or save her, or see her for what she really was.”

            “That’s what this is about? Myka, Lady Cuckoo pulled a fast one on all of us. It was just a mistake.”

            The table Myka threw the book crate down on nearly cracked, but she didn’t even bother to wince. All she could think of was Sam on the steps of the Denver train station, and he had been early, but this self-doubt that was eating her now could easily have made her too late. She was afraid, not angry, but that line was always thin with her. She rounded on Pete and started yelling.

            “Just a mistake? Pete, how can you even begin to trust a partner who makes that kind of mistake? And why the hell would you come here and trust me with a case after all of this?”

            “I trust you!” Pete shouted over her. “You’re my partner. And I’m trusting you with this case because you are an expert in what we’re dealing with here.”

            Myka slammed a book from the crate onto the shelf.

            “No, Pete. I am no longer an expert on things that make you old in two seconds, or electrify your spine, or switch your bodies and make you explode in a hotel bathtub! Now I am just an expert on books.”

            “Exactly! God, if you’d get your nose out of your own butt for five seconds I could have told you that.”

            He didn’t mean it that way, like what she felt didn’t matter. Myka could tell the second she glared at him, the way he stepped back and ducked his head, that he hadn’t meant it that way. She still tried to hold onto the resentment.

            “I just… I have some questions,” Pete said, quieter, palms up,

            “Well you could have phoned,” she shot back, refusing, again, to look at him.           

            “Look, correct me if I’m wrong, which you’re also an expert on doing, but you know everything there is to know about the Bird of Avon.”

            The resentment was gone, and she knew he said that on purpose, but then, it was Pete, so maybe he hadn’t, and he was just infuriating and… Myka looked to the ceiling, took a breath, and whispered, “Bard. It’s the Bard of Avon, Pete.”

            He grinned at her. “See? You’re already helping.”

            Myka turned back to the crate, sputtering, “Would you please just, please…”

            Pete groaned like he’d been kicked and covered his face with his hands.

            “Come on, Myka!” he growled, “If I was having some crazy mid-life crisis and you were looking for an artifact about football or porn, I’d help you!”

            Someone else came through the door, and Pete was wearing Myka down, and she had to get rid of him right now. She told him to try a library and turned her attention to the other man, who looked exhausted.

            “Man is it hard to park around here,” he sighed.

            “Hi, can I,” Myka started, but she sounded tense, so she stopped and tried again. “Can I help you?”

            Pete sighed, “Yeah, this is Steve, the replacement Myka. Steve, the old Myka.”

            Oh.

            Steve’s face lit up as he exclaimed, “Oh, Myka, right!” as if he were meeting the subject of a hundred stories. It hurt, that Pete might have been telling stories, that he must miss her. But then, that depended on what stories he’d told.

            “So I take it he’s mentioned me?” Myka asked.

            Both men panicked, a chorus of no’s like the sudden disruption of a flock of birds. Steve was an even worse liar than Pete. Finally, his shoulders sagged, and he turned his sweet, boyish face to her and said, “We need your help.”

           

 

            It had been encouraging, it really had. Myka was brilliant, and she had what seemed like the answer, based on how excited she and Pete had gotten about it. Steve could tell they’d fought about something: Pete lied to her about not needing help, and when Steve asked, he insisted he was fine, which was also a lie. But that was none of his business, and it made Pete stop telling stupid jokes. They knew what they were looking for. This day might actually end.

            And then Steve had opened an envelope, and the day became worse than he had ever imagined. And then Steve had a woman’s mouth on his, and that would have been deeply confusing if he hadn’t been so busy being confused about what she was making him say and the fact that he was suddenly suffocating.

            “Congratulations,” Myka said when Steve was only panting as much as she was, and when had she gotten here, anyway? “You have almost been killed by an artifact, you are now officially a Warehouse Agent.”

            Truth. Sarcasm, but she was serious about the artifact part. Steve didn’t have enough oxygen getting to his brain to decide whether or not he liked being an official Warehouse agent, but he was pretty sure he liked Myka Bering.

            She helped him sit up, then turned to watch Pete pace.

            “No way!” Pete said. “You come after my team?”

            _My team_. Apparently it was official, then.

            Pete snarled something about tesla-ing this guy sterile, and Myka intervened about the volume. Steve finally got a breath deep enough to panic.

            “What the hell was that?” he gasped, standing up.

            Myka looked at him like it was obvious. “Othello. He smothered Desdemona with a pillow. _Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra_? Look, I did some digging in the history of the Lost Folio, and listen to this!”

            She recited poetry. Poetry about touching the page of a book and dying. And she was serious, and Pete didn’t look surprised. “Fancy words make me sleepy,” he said. Myka glared and kept reading. And then she explained, and in the alternate reality Steve had clearly woken up in, what she was saying made a lot of sense.

            “Are there any connections between the victims?” she asked.

            “Only this hotel and a bunch of investment bankers who are meeting here later tonight,” Steve told her, and she started connecting the dots. Steve was helping when Pete interrupted.

            “Wait wait wait wait wait. I’m sorry. Are you back in?” he asked. “Because, what? You’re just all interested now, so you’re just back in?”

            “No, I’m just here to help.”

            “Oh, well I’m sorry, Mykes. You can’t have it both ways. We don’t need a consultant!”

            “Oh don’t you?” Myka said. “Because I’m pretty sure that if I didn’t get here in time…”

            Good point, Steve thought. But this argument was escalating, and Steve had no idea why.

            “Oh, really? ‘Cause if you hadn’t been playing hooky and trying to get yourself fired…”

            Ah. Okay, then.

            “Well, I have a lot that I’m trying to deal with right now! It’s not the easiest decision I’ve ever had to make!”

            “Well maybe if you had _talked to me_ I could have…”

            “Hey!” Steve shouted, because this was going nowhere, and it was getting loud. They both turned to him in unison, which was terrifying, and barked, “What?”

            “I’m pretty okay with her being back, since she just saved my life and all. So maybe you two can work on your repressed sexual tension sometime when we don’t have a book running around trying to suffocate people.”

            It sounded ridiculous when he said it out loud, even though he knew it was true. The looks on Pete and Myka’s faces were ridiculous, too, a mix of embarrassed and horrified that was a lot funnier than Pete’s jokes. But he still wasn’t laughing.

            “Maybe our next step,” Steve continued, “should be to check the tapes and see who left that envelope for me to die from.”

            Myka and Pete agreed and scampered off. Steve took a moment to breathe before he followed them.

            Impressively, they got it done. Not exactly in a professional manner, but four people didn’t die and they found the last page of the folio, so that counted for a lot. Sometime in all the hubbub of Pete and Steve getting thrown out, though, Myka had slipped away.

            “God damn HG Wells,” Pete growled when he realized she was gone.

            “Okay,” Steve begged, “will you please at least explain to me some part of what’s going on?”

           

 

            Myka took her gun apart and packed it away in her car. The loss of weight made her seem too loose, too light; she had thought three months would get rid of that feeling, but apparently it only took one carry to ruin it all.

            The bookstore was quiet and dark, but Myka had slipped in this way from dozens of midnight walks. She navigated the shelves with ease, settling into an armchair at the back and turning on a Tiffany lamp. The light illuminated elegant pink shoes, and Myka nearly jumped out of her skin.

            “God!” she gasped. “Mrs. Frederick. I keep forgetting about that!”

            “You were so helpful during our recent mission, I just wanted to thank you in person,” Mrs. Frederick said.

            She was smiling, but Myka couldn’t tell what that meant, exactly. She stood and shoved her hands in her pockets.

            “You’re welcome,” she said, a little cautiously. “I’m glad I could help. Really.”

            Mrs. Frederick took a deep breath before she said, “I have something that belongs to you. Ms. Donovan found it among some official documents that were removed from your car.”

            It was a delicately folded and slightly bulging sheet of cheap stationary. When Myka took it, a scent wafted faintly from it; it was familiar, and Myka tried to tell herself it was just an illusion.

            Helena’s ring fell into her hand when she unfolded the paper, and there was no more denying that the whole thing smelled like her.

            “But how is this…” she started, but when she looked up, Mrs. Frederick was gone.

            Myka settled back into the chair, adjusted the lampshade, and started to read.

 

_My dearest Myka,_

_I can imagine the tumult this must cause you, that I am gone, that the person you assumed I was, was in fact never here. I know how you hate to be lied to. If you do not hate me now, you soon will, when my mistakes have come to light. Be careful, Myka. Hate so easily turns to fear._

_My wish for you is that your life, your world, return to its course; I hope to alter your path precious little, as you have altered mine dramatically and beyond repair. Along my way, I lost sight of the truth of who I was. Do not walk away from your truth._

_I will never come to you for forgiveness, may indeed never come to you again at all. I ask and deserve nothing from you. Still, I carry the gift of our friendship with me, grateful and clinging to the hope it gives me. There is no one on this earth but you who could have saved me._

_My ring I leave as a token of gratitude, a hay penny down the deepest of wells. I would fill it to overflowing if I could._

_All love I have to you,_

_Helena_

            The first time she read it, all she could do was cry. The second time, she studied every word, held it up to the light of her memory: Helena had been so quiet, angry and distant, when they left Delphi. And hadn’t she been wearing her ring when Myka had left her at Leena’s? Why would she carry stationary on a mission? The timing, the wisdom of her words, the sheer strangeness of a letter from Helena being written and tucked away in her car, pointed to a thought that made her cry again, and she read the letter over and over until she couldn’t sit still anymore.

            Helena was alive.

 

 

            Her certainty faded somewhere along the highway, and she let it. There was nothing to do about it now.

She drove through the night to get home, one hand on the wheel and one closed around Helena’s ring, on a chain around her neck. The Warehouse stopped its worried crackling, in a wave from the balcony through the stacks, the moment she stepped inside.

            _Good,_ it seemed to grumble in its early morning half-sleep. _Good._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Oscar Wilde passage is from "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," published in 1898.
> 
> The Thomas Wolfe novel mentioned is called You Can’t Go Home Again, published in 1940.
> 
> Some dialogue is from "The New Guy" by Jack Kenny.


	8. Before and After

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: flashbacks, mentions of alcohol

            “Helena is working for a car mechanic?” Vanessa repeated. She was eying Harper over the top of her coffee mug, and he could hear the skepticism.

            “It’s a perfectly respectable job, under the table pay…”

            “Harper, she can hardly drive! How does this mechanic expect her to work on cars?”

            “She drives just fine,” Harper lied. “And she’s taken my engine apart and put it back together a dozen times. Machines are her element.”

            Vanessa sat back in the rocking chair, waving her hand and saying, “Fine, fine,” and the two of them settled down a while to admire the one tree that had managed to change color before its leaves burned up. The November wind batted the leaves around and tore them off. The neighbors were raking. It was probably something Harper should do, too, or make Lee Mai take care of, but today he couldn’t bring himself to do much of anything. Helena had rounded up the kids and made them help her make pancakes, and Vanessa took a day off for once in her life, so Harper was going to sit on his porch and listen to the Christmas carols that came screeching out of his house like they were the music of angels, even if they were almost painful to hear.

            “I gotta admit,” he said after a while, “it’s nice to know there’s at least something she’s not good at.”

            Vanessa laughed. “She sounds like a bird in a blender.”

            “Can’t sing, can’t cook, but bless her heart, she’s happy.”

            A rush of wind ripped a few leaves off the one good autumn tree. Harper zipped up his sweater.

            The smoke detector went off in the kitchen, and when Helena flung the window open, her painfully English half-swears were even more raucous over the screeching din than her singing had been. She only got funnier when she heard Vanessa and Harper laughing.

            Vanessa warned, “You’d better make sure that apartment has a fire extinguisher.”

           

 

            Jabbing the button on the smoke detector with a broom handle made it stop shrieking, and Helena turned her attention to the smoking disks in the frying pan.

            “Right then,” she declared, “perhaps we should turn the stove down and keep a better eye on it?”

            Clea giggled. Helena kissed her head and scraped the frying pan into the garbage. Lee Mai took over cooking, which, Helena admitted to herself, was probably for the best. She stole a frozen blueberry from the bowl on the counter, passed one to Clea, and stood back to study how Lee Mai managed not to be a fire hazard in the kitchen.

            “Are you going to make pancakes in your house?” Clea asked. She’d squirted blueberry juice all over her chin, and Helena wiped it away with the back of her hand.

            “I don’t see why not,” Helena told her. “I have to eat something, and I’m rather fond of pancakes. There was a special tradition around them, in the old days.”

            “How old are pancakes?” Lee Mai asked.

            Helena cleared her throat, warning Lee Mai not to try their pancake-flipping trick again (it was the whole reason she’d attempted the cooking in the first place, to avoid that particular mess), before she answered, “The ancient Greeks made them, I believe.”

            “Why are you moving away?”

            Lee Mai groaned at their sister’s question, but Helena lifted herself onto the counter beside the little girl, weighing words while she combed Clea’s hair back.

            “Have you ever met someone you haven’t seen in a very long while, and they tell you how they can remember you when you were so much smaller? And sometimes it’s hard for them to remember how old you are.”

            Clea nodded. Lee Mai turned the radio down to listen.

            “These people can tell that you’ve grown, though, because you’re taller, and you can push yourself on the swing and recite all your letters in order. I’ve grown a lot, too, but I haven’t got any bigger, so I have to prove myself in other ways, like being a grown-up and living on my own.”

            “But who do you have to prove it to?” Lee Mai asked.

            “Myself, I suppose,” Helena sighed, pushing aside her useless, reckless longing for the Warehouse. For Myka.

            The thought persisted, however, cropping up at the breakfast table, when she settled down to bed, and as she stumbled with rented furniture up the stairs of an apartment complex days later. It disturbed the calculated peace of her mind like the unfamiliar night sounds of the apartment as she tried, for first time in months, to go to sleep in an empty home.

           

 

            Steve was learning quickly not to trust artifacts. Because Pete and Myka could tease all they wanted, but Steve had lost three hours or so in that bronzer machine, and the way they’d acted had been just downright creepy. Actually, they were still being weird, and Steve was seriously considering hosing them down with neutralizer just in case.

            “Man, Steve-o, we had to run down like five artifacts without you. Took forever!” Pete griped. “And I missed my late night snack time!”

            “Yeah, I’m sure it was a pain. So explain to me again what happened?”

            Pete and Myka started babbling over each other, something about artifacts and mushrooms, and hadn’t Artie told him not to touch things? Really Steve, honestly.

            “Okay,” he finally cut in, “you do realize that talking fast and telling multiple lies at once doesn’t fool me, right?”

            The two agents stared at each other, and Steve watched the color seep back into Myka’s hair while he waited. Neither agent said anything else.

            “Can you at least tell me what happened to Pete’s shoes?”

            They looked at Pete’s feet, both of them, like they expected something other than socks to be there. And then they stared at each other again, until something in the Warehouse clanged.

            “Oh crap!”

            “Oh man, okay. I’m gonna go deal with that,” Pete said.

            Myka nodded frantically, saying, “Go do that!” and Pete went sprinting away down the aisle.

            When Pete’s pounding footsteps faded, Myka turned to Steve, her face a mix of worry and wincing.

            “Are you okay?” she asked.

            “I’m really confused,” Steve answered, hands on his hips.

            “Pete probably won’t want to talk about it, ever, so this is just between us. Those juggling balls he knocked down? They make you drunk, nasty drunk, and Pete is not a fan of alcohol. He was trying to find you and keep up with me, so he acted brave, but…” Myka glanced down the aisle. “I think it scared him. We didn’t want to be cruel; it was just the artifact. I’m really sorry, and I’m glad you’re okay.”

            Truth. Finally. And thank god the people we was working with weren’t evil. Speaking of evil…

            “Are you okay?” he asked Myka. “I mean, with the Bronze Sector. I’ve heard HG Wells is kind of a sore spot for you.”

            Myka froze again, that wide-eyed expression on her face, and when this conversation was done, Steve was going to drive them all home and make sure they all went to bed, because she had to be exhausted if she was this easily dazed.

            “Yeah,” she finally said. “It wasn’t a problem.”

            That was the truth, but it wasn’t really what he’d asked. Steve was going to push it when Pete yelled for her, and Myka bounded through the stacks to his rescue before Steve could even open his mouth.

           

 

            When Steve got up the next morning to meditate, even Leena wasn’t awake. It was early, it was chilly outside, and Myka was sprawled on the loveseat in the sunroom, eating something out of a bowl. There was a book on her lap, but the light was too dim and the spine too cracked and worn for him to read the title.

            Steve knocked on the doorframe before he asked, “What are you eating?”

            “Frosting,” Myka said, holding the bowl out to him.

            He swiped his finger along the edge to get a taste, then pulled up a chair. Myka stuffed a spoonful of frosting into her mouth.

            “Pete says you don’t share food.”

            “Pete’s definition of sharing is taking ninety percent,” Myka said. “I don’t share food with him.”

            She sucked on the spoon for a while, staring out the picture windows. When the spoon was clean, she tapped it against her lips.

            “What else did he say about me?”

            “That if you weren’t sleeping well, something was wrong.”

            Steve was a private person. He respected other people’s personal issues, too, but so much of other people’s privacy was built around lies that Steve felt like an intruder without ever asking a question. Intimate conversations were not his strong suit. Myka, though, was keeping so quiet that she was making everyone around her nervous, and there was something about her and HG Wells that Steve didn’t understand.

            “I never knew her. If you want an unbiased ear,” he offered, “I’m your guy.”

            Myka studied him, took another bite of frosting, and settled deeper into the loveseat, tugging the blanket over her lap higher up. The book fell onto the floor. Steve saw the title when he picked it up and handed it back: _The Invisible Man_. Myka tucked it between her hip and the back of the loveseat, out of sight.

            “No, it’s just… It was weird, you asking about HG in the Bronze Sector. I’d never thought about her that way. We talked about it, I mean, in passing, but I never saw her there, or imagined it. She was always alive to me. She never even crossed my mind while we were there.”

            Steve wasn’t sure how to take that. He went for the obvious and suggested, “Then I brought it up, and now you miss her?”

            Myka tossed the blanket off her lap, tucked the book under her arm as she stood, and said, “If the others ask you, just tell them I’m fine.”

 

 

            The garbage bag had been leaking, and Helena was prepared to deal with that, the same way she’d dealt with the broken microwave and the fact that there was no broom in her apartment (which honestly, _someone_ should have thought of), but as she raised the garbage bag to heave it into the dumpster, it tore and poured soggy garbage like a waterfall.

            Helena was screaming curses when a man jogged down the apartment building steps, calling, “You alright, ma’am?”

            “I’m having a day,” Helena grumbled, scooping newspaper and plastic packaging back into the hole in the garbage bag. She allowed him to assist her, even so far as grabbing part of the bag to help her lift it without further spilling, and nodded when the dumpster slammed shut at last.

            “Helena Wells. Sorry if I disturbed you.”

            “Not at all. I’m Andre. Andre Ojara.”

            Claudia had taught Helena the joys of googling oneself on the internet, and she’d found that, in this new age, there was information on nearly everyone whose name one could spell. Later, she would sort out that googling one’s neighbors was probably not exactly common practice. But Andre Ojara walked her back to her apartment, pointing out his door on the way, and Helena sat down with the laptop she’d made and typed his name into the search bar right away. She spent the rest of the night reading.

            “More garbage problems?” Andre asked when he found her on his doorstep the next evening. There was a streak of motor oil on her neck and a gleam in her eye.

            “Not at all. I just wanted to let you know that I read your story on the internet last night, and…”

            Andre’s shoulders tightened. He put the door a bit in between them. Helena cocked her head while he asked, “This is the part where you ask me to stay away from you, right?”

            “Hardly,” Helena said. “It’s the part where I say, as inappropriate as it may be, that I’m relieved to finally meet someone else who’s been to prison.”

            She flashed him a toothy, sheepish smile, and he leaned against his open door, deflated and confused. Helena’s smile turned apprehensive after a few moments.

            “Is this perhaps the part when you ask me to stay away?”

            Andre shook his head, muttering, “You are a really weird lady.”

            “You don’t know the half of it,” Helena chuckled.

            “Will I get to know all of it sometime?”

            Helena winced. “Would you settle for the half?”

            Andre laughed and walked into his apartment, leaving the door open for Helena to come in.

            The little apartment was a mirror of her own, but far more heavily furnished. A black leather couch was muffled by yards of fleece and cotton fabric, and the spools of thread not contained in a large plastic cabinet rolled freely across the floor. There was a shelf weighted with jars of buttons, a sewing machine on a rickety card table, and a battered folding table littered with paper patterns. It looked like the back of a seamstress’s workshop.

            “Sorry for the mess,” Andre said while he tried in vain to shut an overstuffed wardrobe. “I do costumes for a theatre company, and it’s high season.”

            “Not a problem,” Helena told him. She leaned against the kitchen counter, watching the man putter helplessly around before giving up.

            “Do you drink? Red wine’s supposed to be good for you.”

            “Is it?” Helena accepted the glass he handed her. “Forgive my assumptions, but I hadn’t taken you for a theatre man.”

            Andre shrugged. “They had a program at the prison. It was nice. And I learned to sew working in the laundry room.”

            It sounded simple, but he was beaming. Helena had told high society men that she dabbled in writing with that same smile on her face: not expecting to be taken seriously, but the passion was too much to contain.

            “I’d like to see your work sometime,” she said.

            “There’s pictures online, since you know how to work that. Which, congratulations on, by the way.” Andre finished his wine and set the glass aside, laughing, “Man, I got out three years ago, and it was like fucking time travel. Computers, cell phones, we didn’t have none of that stuff before. I had to go from cassette tapes straight to iPods, no CDs in between. And have you watched reality tv? Folks done broke ignorant and get paid for it. Shit.”

            Helena understood about half of that, but she smiled conspiratorially over her wine glass. She combed through her knowledge of history, matching it with Andre’s conviction in 1982 to find something else he’d missed, and finally asked, “Have you seen the photographs produced by the Hubble space telescope?”

            It shouldn’t have thrilled her, Helena supposed, the way they traded melancholies, filling in together the gaps left behind by twenty-five and a hundred nine years. But Andre spoke the language of hemorrhaged time, measured sharply in “before” and “after,” with what settled in between the two eras bleeding out and seeping into the fabric of both. He was a seventeen-year-old boy from the 1980s flung forward into a new century, alone, and his voice was one of stillness, travel, and trauma. Helena only wished she could tell him about her time machine.

 

 

            For a few days, Helena’s longing for “before” faded, and her mind was occupied with cars and Andre and 1990’s television programs. She brought him to dinner at the Thorndikes’ home and watched him sew on a button Lee Mai had torn off their blouse. For a few days, Helena felt like she belonged.

            They were walking home from the bus stop together when it all shattered. Andre was telling her about the costumes for the Broadway production of _The Lion King_ , complete with hand gestures, and Helena was admiring the Christmas lights lining the roofs of the neighborhood houses. People passed them occasionally, the groups of them huddled together against what Southerners considered the cold, all of them admiring the light displays, waiting at crosswalks, and greeting each other with the deliberately pronounced, “Merry Christmas!” which was so sacred a term in the American South. Helena had taken to saying “Happy holidays” simply to irk the good Christians of Atlanta.

            The voice called out after a cluster of college students, drunk to celebrate the end of their semester. Helena froze. The students ran into her, one by one. Each of them made her stagger backward a step.

            She knew that voice. Moscow. It was cold out now, clawing all the way down to her bones. She wished she had the Titanic driftwood in her arms. Not that it would save her. She had been arrested in Moscow. That voice was one of the Regents’ security officers.

            Myka had scooped her up, shivering, in Moscow. Taken her to a hotel, watched over her. Fallen asleep over her field report. Helena had put her gently to bed. And when she slipped out of the room, into the hallway, Artie had been waiting.

            “I want to talk with you,” he had said.

            Fool, she had followed him.

            And that voice had shouted when she stepped into the lobby. Artie had turned her in.

            “Merry Christmas!” the voice called again, to a young couple that had walked past Helena and toward him.

            “Get on your knees!” she heard the voice cry, sharp and sudden English in the Russian darkness. It had come from her left, and there were two others, on her right and in front. Artie was behind her. All armed.

            Helena grabbed Andre, tight as handcuffs around his wrist. She bolted down the nearest alley. Her teeth were chattering. She bit down on a shout of Myka’s name.

            There was no shouting in Moscow. Helena had whispered that name. Magic charm. Artie paused.

            “Myka. What about Myka?”

            Artie stood over her. Her knees ached on the floor. Her fingers were cold. Myka cared. She’d be furious to find Helena gone.

            “She’ll get over it,” Artie had said.

            Andre was not a runner. They weren’t nearly far enough, but he was begging her to stop. The Regents did not stop. Helena couldn’t unclamp her hand to let him go. Leave him behind.

            “Helena, stop!”

            There had been three officers in Moscow. Where were the other two?

            “Helena, stop!”

            Andre grabbed her wrist to pry her loose. Helena screamed. She tried to stop, turn, swing. She lost her footing on the gravel. She fell on her knees.

            The smell of rancid garbage from the dumpster next to her cut through the flashback, and a few deep breaths relaxed her hand. She held up a finger for Andre to wait until all that was left was the trembling. “It wasn’t real” still warred with “It always will be” in her mind. In the beginning, after McPherson but before her reinstatement (which was after that night in Moscow), she had stuck close to Agent Bering, safe in her shadow because the Regents and their officers had better things to do than micromanage their agents. Anything within a fifty-mile radius was stable; often she had been much closer. Now, there was no such shelter. Stupid, she had almost forgotten.

            “What’s going on, man?” Andre asked her.

            Andre was on parole for life. He didn’t even drive a car because he was afraid to be pulled over. He would understand, if only she could explain.

            Helena ran a hand through her hair and sobbed, “I can’t live like this.”

 


	9. 3, 2, 1

            Pete whined like it was a privilege, but Myka only rode in the cherry picker because facing your fears is good for you. Halfway up, her knuckles had gone white from gripping the edge of the bucket. She really should have just let Pete do this. Close inspection of the destroyed billboard, a few questions, and Myka was back on the ground.

            She’d been doing well for a while. It was nice to have Steve around, a new face to get familiar with, and she was well and truly back at work, in the flow of things. She slept and ate and didn’t think about dead people much at all. Now though, her jaw was tight, and the smells wafting out of the diner where Pete had parked himself were heavenly. And then of course there was that itching in her mind, that feeling of knowing something but not having the words yet. Something about this case was familiar.

            Pete was sitting in a booth in the diner, surrounded by the remains of four slices of pie. The waitress was giggling at something he’d said. He could really be a charmer, Myka thought, when he didn’t try to talk with is mouth full. She scowled at the crusts of pie, trying to convince herself they didn’t look delicious.

            “The power’s out, the banana cream pie goes bad!” Pete protested, because apparently he thought she was glaring at him. “I didn’t eat the crust, just the healthy part. And you got to ride in the cherry picker!”

            _Don’t remind me,_ Myka thought as she rolled her eyes and slid into the booth. “Well I was investigating. So, did you find anything out here, you know, other than what warm lemon meringue tastes like?”

            It was meant to make the food sound disgusting. It didn’t work. Myka picked up a crust, sniffed it, and gave in.

            “Oh, actually, Pammy said,” and Pete put a friendly hand on Pammy’s arm, “that just before the power went out, she heard kind of like a horn sound.”

            He turned to Pammy for confirmation, and she grinned at him, despite the fact that he was smudging banana cream onto her nice green shirt. But when she turned to Myka, she frowned, saying, “I don’t see how it matters, though. It was just lightning. Is this gonna hold up getting the power back on?”

            Myka tried to look reassuring while she stacked the now clean plates and passed them over. Lunch rush was coming up, so she could understand the concern.

            “No, no, they should have it back up and running soon.”

            Pammy smiled at her, then, too, and everyone was just full of smiles today, weren’t they? Myka watched her go before leaning across the table to Pete.

            “Okay, it wasn’t just lightning. The body was completely disintegrated.”

            “Right,” Pete agreed around a mouthful of pie, because who needs manners if you’re not sweet-talking someone? “And took half the billboard with it.”

            “What was weird is that the edge of the billboard was worn, almost like it was in a sandstorm.”

            Sandstorm. That was it. Something about that was… Myka leaned back in the booth, thinking, while Pete made a couple of ridiculous suggestions. He was sliding the last piecrust across the table to her when she suddenly understood.

            “I have an idea,” she said. “But it’s not a good one.”

           

            “I should have guessed Wells would have something to do with a disaster like this!” Artie growled, slamming the file on the table in his office.

            Myka spread the papers out so everything they had was visible, and chastened, “Really Artie? People die all the time, but suddenly it’s a disaster because HG is…”

            “The billboard worker was not the first death.”

            Artie and Myka stared at each other. Claudia elaborated just to cut the tension.

            “Day before yesterday,” she explained, “a painter disappeared from the top of the Fort Pitt Bridge. The police thought he fell into the river, but…”

            “Yeah, they’re not gonna find his body. The witnesses heard exactly the same noise as that waitress,” Artie said.

            “Did you check the traffic cams?”

            Artie waved away Pete’s question, saying, “The bridge was out. We’ve tried to find links between the victims, locations, witnesses—we got nothing.”

            “Except whatever Myka’s got.”

            Myka sighed at the papers she’d laid out. “That’s not much. HG worked on a case with these details, but the files have been redacted to hell. We might be able to piece something together, but…” _But it’d be a lot easier if she were here._

“I can fix that!” Claudia shouted, and Myka had to jump to get out of her way. The girl had her phone out, and she was snapping pictures of every page. “I had to hack a lot of old files to figure out what Joshua had done with Rheticus’ compass, and some of it was redacted government… You know what? You don’t have to know that. The point is, I have a program that can scan the intensities of blackness in these files and bring out at least some of the text.”

            Myka patted Claudia’s shoulder, saying, “Nice work, Claud,” and ignoring the fact that she’d pocketed a photograph of Helena. It should have occurred to her before now, Myka thought guiltily, that Claudia would miss her, too.

            “Why was this stuff covered up to begin with?” Pete asked. “I mean, you’d think if it was intel on a seriously dangerous artifact, Warehouse 12 would want us to know.”

            Artie shrugged. “The Regents are very secretive, and it was even worse back then. The first model of Warehouse 13 had just burned down, there was a great deal of transition happening, and then of course the general build-up toward World War I. The world at large might not have known war was coming, but the Regents certainly did. It’s part of the reason the Warehouse was moved overseas. Fascinating story, how they picked this location…”

            “A fascinating story we can hear later, when we need something to put us all to sleep,” Claudia said from her place in the armchair across the room.

            “My point is, it was a paranoid time. The information being hidden could be anything from concern over protecting Warehouse 12 after its closure to a desire to preserve its majestic history in the face of some sort of revealing accident or scandal.”

            “Oooh, scandal! And with HG involved…” Pete wiggled his eyebrows, and Myka punched him in the arm.

            “It was 1901, Pete. Everything about her was a scandal.”

            Claudia laughed, typed something, and slipped back into focus. Myka pawed through the papers again and listened with half an ear to Artie’s muttering. Something about the case was bothering him. She was about to ask what the trouble was when Claudia spoke up.

            “Definitely a scandal cover-up. Two agents were murdered by another agent, Vincent Crowley. He stole the artifact from them, killed another guy with it, and tried to use it to power, get this: HG Wells’ rocket ship.”

            “HG Wells built a rocket ship? In 1901?”

            “She built a time machine in 1899,” Myka said. “What was the artifact? Is there a description, or…”

            “It just says horn. Hold up, there’s more text coming through.”

            Artie bolted up from his desk, ran into the archive room, and after a sound of tearing paper, scrambled back into the office with a massive poster in his hands.

            “This horn?” he asked, pointing to a figure holding a ram’s horn.

            “Maybe,” Claudia said. “I’m working on it.”

            “That’s Joshua’s horn. That’s not good,” Artie muttered. And he kept muttering.

            “Okay, final report says ‘Wells and Wolcott report that Agent Crowley something something English dominance… Wells wrested control of the craft and shot it into the stratosphere. The Artefact is no longer of this world, and no longer the concern of Warehouse 12.’ Description on another page matches the picture. I mean, hard to get scale off a wood engraving, but how many killer goat horns can there be?”

            “So, Joshua’s trumpet is in outer space,” Pete said. “Guess it’s back to the drawing board.”

            “Unless what went up came down again. I mean, the power required to escape the earth’s gravity is massive. It could have got stuck in a retrograde orbit, which means it would eventually get pulled back to the surface,” Claudia explained. "Did you know the moons of Mars are in retrograde... God, Artie! I'm picking up all your bad habits!" 

            Myka turned to Artie and asked, “Have there been any crashes recently? I mean, it seems like something that would make the news somewhere.”

            “Crash,” Artie echoed, and he was still in his own world. Myka turned back to Claudia, who was frowning.

            “File says the original range of the horn was fifteen to twenty meters. That’s what, fifty feet? If this is the same artifact, it must have been modified somehow. And I was so totally looking forward to triangulating and finding this thing!”

            They spun their wheels for a while before Artie told them to go to bed, and he’d call them in the morning. He arrived at six, and by nine, Pete and Myka were in Greensburg, Ohio, on the fifty-year-old trail of Joshua’s horn.

 

            “What are you doing in here?”

            Helena looked up from her notes, sketched out in chalk on the attic floor in the Thorndikes’ house. Lee Mai was staring at her. It occurred to Helena then what a picture she must have made, half sitting on a pile of heavily redacted papers, with names, equations, and a rough map of Pittsburg drawn around her like some devil’s incantation. Her hair was in a tangled bun, and there was chalk smeared all the way up to her elbows. Helena dusted her hands off, a useless gesture, and passed Lee Mai the stack of papers she’d printed out.

            “An artifact is active that I dealt with at Warehouse 12. Two modern victims so far, and at least four from the past. Pete and Myka are examining a scene in Ohio to confirm that the artifact from each of these three cases is the same; they’ll send pictures to Claudia, and Claudia will send them on to me. It’s rather exciting, being able to consult like this.” Helena sighed and gazed at the expanse of her work. “I’ve never been to Ohio.”

            “I don’t think my dad would like this,” Lee Mai mumbled.

            “Happily, your father isn’t here.”

            “But how is Claudia getting away with talking to you about a case?”

            “By lying a great deal, I imagine,” Helena replied. She returned to her study of buildings surrounding the billboard victim’s location, attempting to help Claudia locate a possible vantage point for an assassin and sort out a range. If they could calculate how far the attacker was from the victim, they might be able to find evidence, a sniper’s nest, a boot print, something. Of course, there weren’t many places of a height with the top of the Fort Pitt Bridge…

            “That seems dangerous, Hel,” Lee Mai said.

            Helena shrugged. “So is the artifact, I assure you.”

            “Helena.”

            “Lee, this horn has been killing people for over a century, and I’m the only person alive who’s even seen it! I thought I’d taken care of it in 1901, but since then, three people have died. The Warehouse needs what I know. This problem is…”

            Lee Mai held up and hand, saying, “If that sentence ends in fault, I swear to god.”

            “Is my responsibility,” Helena finished. “I know there’s nothing else I could have done back then, let alone in 1962, but there’s plenty I can do now. This horn was in my hands to take care of, and if I don’t, there may be no one else who can.”

            “There are other agents now. You’re risking your whole life here, maybe having to go on the run again, to do a job that’s not your job anymore.”

            A bolt of fear shot through Helena, the same as it had a dozen times today, leaving a scent of bronze in its wake. She shook her head, muttering, “It’s always my job. I’m a Warehouse agent,” and turned to her dinging phone. A picture from Claudia came through, and Helena displayed it with delight.

            “This is from my rocket!” she exclaimed.

            “Your what?”

            “I built a rocket, and the horn was in it when…”

            Lee Mai held up their hands, saying, “No, further back than that. Context.”

            “I built a rocket ship in 1901, and I sent the artifact we’re hunting into space on said rocket because that is the sort of thing that happens in my life.”

            Helena stared expectantly, and Lee Mai finally laughed. “Good enough.”

            “Charles always nagged about sufficient information in my books. ‘Really Helen, you must explain what goes on in that head of yours. Isn’t there a line between treating us like baboons and assuming we’re all as mad as…’ Ah! More clues!”

            She dove at her dinging phone while Lee Mai laughed, but the mirth drained quickly away.

            “Two more victims,” Helena said, tossing her phone aside. “A helicopter was taken out of the sky from a mile up. God, how can this monstrous thing be… Wait. Up?”

            Helena added a third mark to her map of Pittsburg. The victims were in a neat arc, to the side and ever upward, and the signal could be blaring from somewhere on the ground. Only way to calculate _where,_ though, was to get some idea of what was being aimed at (no connection between victims suggested collateral damage, which combined with the increasing distance meant there must be some target _beyond_ ) and get the shooting angle. Helena took a picture of her work and sent it to Claudia, but the clever girl had already thought that far.

            “What is SETI?” Helena asked when Claudia told her about Daniel Varley.

            “Oh, it’s the uh,” Lee Mai snapped their fingers until they remembered, “the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Alien hunters, basically. And now I’m contributing to your bad behaviour.”

            Helena half smiled at that. Claudia was filling her in on Daniel Varley’s father, however, and this damn case was getting worse and worse. She started to pace, smudging some of her notes under her boots.

            “You okay?”

            “I hate this bloody horn,” Helena growled.

            In a way, Joshua’s trumpet had been the beginning of Warehouse 12’s undoing. Vincent Crowley, senior agent, had killed agents Aymond and Lister over the horn, and then he’d lost his life to it as well. Wooley, McShane, and Helena had muddled on for a barely a month, and then… Helena turned on her heel and away from thoughts of McShane’s death. Helena had been bronzed and, she imagined, packed rather quickly into one of the crates marked with the number 13. Wooley hadn’t made the journey, and Caturanga, dear Caturanga, had arrived alone at what was then still a bare skeleton, being rebuilt over a blackened hole in the ground. Warehouse 12 had not gone peacefully to its rest.

            Neither, it was clear now, would Joshua’s horn. Helena massaged her aching right hand and prayed to the ghost of her team that she could put an end to this.

            And then Claudia texted her about Gliese 581, the star that might have life, about Daniel Varley’s intentions, and the forty thousand lives at risk in Allegheny Field. Helena was helpless, trapped in Atlanta, but Lee Mai raised a cautious hand.

            “I have an idea,” they said. “But it’s not a good one.”

 

            Myka was tough enough to admit when she was scared. She had no angle on Daniel Varley, no comprehension of what this man must have been through, why on earth he was doing this. There was no way for her to talk him down.

            At least he wasn’t going to hurt them. He’d trusted Jack and Rebecca, recognized the tesla, and really, this guy was brilliant.

            “Daniel, you’re a smart guy,” Myka tried, because if he was as insecure about his intelligence and she could be, it might persuade him to at least _think._ “You’ve already seen what the horn can do.”

            “If you do this, it’s gonna rip right through Allegheny Field!”’ Pete pleaded.

            “I don’t believe you!” Daniel shouted back, and he’d denied the deaths once already, so really, they should have figured this wouldn’t go well. “And I don’t care. They need to know I’m here, to see me.”

            And okay, Myka had needed to be seen once, too. By her father, her male coworkers, Artie. Myka had never lost control, though. Granted, control had never really been taken away from her, not until Sam, and she was so not going there right now.

            Daniel Varley punched a button on his computer console, and a timer flashed on-screen. Three minutes. Oh god.

            “Daniel, a lot of people are gonna die at Allegheny Field tonight. Why would you want that?”

            “I’ve waited all my life!” Daniel wailed. “Those aliens took my father from me!”

            God, Myka could almost feel it, almost understand. But she didn’t know what to say.

            The Farnsworth blared, and Myka answered, desperate.

            “Please tell me you have something!”

            “I do,” Claudia said, “but it’s kinda weird and I’m not sure it’ll work. I need you to imagine HG.”

            “What?” Myka demanded, but there were dozens of pictures of Helena trapped in her mind like pressed flowers, no life to them, but clear and perfect: Helena smirking up at them as she escaped from Atlas House, whooping in delight and far too close to Myka while they dangled over an alley in California, buried in books, sweating after a workout, fisting her hands in Myka’s shirt.

            Pete yelled, “What the hell?” and when Myka looked up, Helena was there.

            She turned away before Myka could look her in the eye.

            “You’re Daniel Varley, then. You want to know what happened to your father?” she asked.

            Daniel nodded, and Helena’s shoulders sagged.

            “The truth is, “ she told him, “I built that rocket.”

            “You’re the alien? The device is yours?”

            Helena faltered. “I built the rocket that carried it here, yes. I’m sorry about your father, Daniel. He’s gone.”

            “I know,” Daniel whimpered, and Myka held her breath while Helena inched forward. “And now it’s your turn.”

            Helena didn’t flinch at the sight of the gun. She flung her arm backward, shouting, “Myka, get back!”

            Pete grabbed Myka’s arm, pulled her to the side, and Helena took another step toward the gun barrel. She was so real, Myka almost dove forward to save her. But she was hypnotized by the way Helena moved fearlessly forward, the way her edges smeared into the background, and how could she possibly be here?

            “It worked,” Daniel snarled. “I got you to come here. You killed my father, and now I’m gonna kill you.”

            Helena nodded. “You want revenge. I understand that. And you’re right to blame me, Daniel; I am responsible. But please, you have to listen to me.”

            She stepped right up to the barrier, the one Pete’s tesla ray couldn’t penetrate, hesitated, and stepped through.

            “Claudia,” Myka rasped into the still-open Farnsworth, “how the hell are you doing this?”

 

            “Number one rule with Dad’s projector thingy,” Lee Mai had warned, “is don’t let anyone touch you. Things are okay, usually, but if it has a pulse, it’ll transport you. Basically, the machine rips you apart and throws you together again, and that sucks.”

            Apparently the rule about touching inanimate objects being okay didn’t preclude the element of “suck” Lee Mai had described. When Helena stepped through Daniel Varley’s barrier, her vision blurred, skewing from his desperate face to Lee Mai’s worried one in Atlanta. Helena’s stomach lurched, her skin tingled, and for a moment, she thought she’d transported herself. She’d prepared herself for that possibility before she stepped through, knowing there was no retreat.

            But her view of Daniel snapped back, upside down at first, then right side up again. The barrier must have simply interfered with the projector’s signal. Helena shook her head to relieve the dizziness, then glanced at Daniel’s timer. Barely a minute left.

            “Daniel,” she said, “we’ve all lost loved ones unfairly. For me, it was my daughter.”

            Helena’s shaking, glitching fingers automatically sought the locket around her neck. Fifty-six seconds.

            “I was so angry, in such pain. I almost hurt a great many people. I didn’t care, just like you. But that’s not what makes us better, it isn’t a cure for this agony.” Helena sobbed. She hadn’t planned this, to say everything in her soul to this desperate man. The words were like razors. He was shaken, however, so she choked out the last cutting fact and hoped it would be enough. “And it doesn’t bring our loved ones back. This isn’t the answer.”

            Daniel was in tears. The gun trembled in his hand, and Helena wondered how much he even knew about shooting it.

            “Why did you send it?” he pleaded. “Why did he have to die?”

            Thirty-four seconds.

            “Oh Daniel.” Helena was crying now, and she let him see. “It was an accident. A terrible accident. It was my job to keep the horn from hurting anyone, and I failed. And your father, and you, you paid for my failure. For that, I’m so dreadfully sorry. But no one else needs to die now, do they?”

            Daniel mouthed an answer through his tears, turned away, and stopped the clock. Helena reached out, nearly touched him before she remembered.

            “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

            The barrier between them and the rest of the world fell, the spell of urgency broke, and Helena started to panic.

            Myka was here.

            Helena wanted to watch the sparks of the neutralized horn flash in Myka’s eyes. She wanted to turn around, to look at her. But Myka knew her too well. Myka would find her out.

            She had almost decided she didn’t care, had just started to turn, when the projector turned off.

 

            Myka was running forward, reaching out, when Helena vanished. She put a hand on Daniel Varley’s arm instead.

            Pete climbed up and into the satellite dish, bagged the horn, and jumped down.

            “That was weird,” he muttered.

            Myka nodded, but she didn’t really hear him. She was still scanning the building, like Helena would pop up again in some random corner, and Myka would miss her if she wasn’t careful. One blink, and she’d slip away again.

            Claudia spent half an hour explaining how she’d created the hologram while Pete drove to the airport and Myka sat beside him with her feet on the dash, listening and over-thinking everything. Farnsworth’s 3-D camera and projector, okay, that much made sense. But Claudia was talking about an artifact that could display what a person was thinking, and she had hooked that up to the projector and somehow… broadcast Myka’s memory of Helena?

            “Why me, though, Claud? And why HG?” Myka asked. “I mean, you could have made up an alien and sent that through.”

            “Yeah, but creating an alien, its face, speech patterns, backstory? I had three minutes, Myka. There wasn’t time to make a character strong enough to get projected clearly, let alone convince Daniel Varley. And why you? Because you have perfect memory and you know HG well, that’s why.”

            Myka shook her head. “But if you needed a convincing character, why not send yourself? I mean, you know you better than anyone else.”

            “I was trying to make sure the machine worked. I didn’t have the brainpower to write the script, run the projector, _and_ create the character. Look, it wasn’t exactly the most streamlined process, but again, three minutes! I think I did pretty good.”

            Claudia was insistent and frazzled. Granted, so was Myka. They were all wiped out.

            “You totally busted this case, man,” Pete told Claudia before he shut the Farnsworth. “Awesome job. Kirk out.”

            He was right. Claudia had solved this whole case, top to bottom. Redacted files, antique brass hardware, triangulation, right on down to a miracle save with six seconds before disaster. It was prodigious, and something about it didn’t seem right.

            First of all, Claudia was a genius, but she wasn’t the only genius on the planet. A program with the ability to read redacted files must be some kind of Holy Grail for spies all over the world, and if it could be done, Claudia wasn’t the only one who could do it. Especially when the solution was so simple: darker shades of blackness, thicker layers of ink? Someone must have tried that before.

            But then what? Claudia was lying? Myka couldn’t think of a single reason Claudia would do that. Well, unless she considered another series of wild possibilities.

            Helena was alive. Helena was in touch with Claudia. And she was helping them solve cases long-distance. Stupid moves for someone who was in hiding, and Helena was anything but stupid. Ulterior motive, then. Helena was alive, and she was manipulating Claudia so she could… what? Well, if Myka knew that, she might actually understand Helena G. Wells, and that was a physical impossibility.

            Myka thumped her head against the passenger side window. Occam’s Razor rarely applied in the Warehouse, especially when Claudia or Helena was involved. All Myka could really do was look at what was universal in all options and move forward from there. That, and maybe badger Claudia until she slipped up and revealed something. Like where Helena was, how they were communicating, so Myka could find her and…

            And what? Hug her? Scream at her? Choke her again? On a given day, Myka was in the mood to do any of the above. But when Myka cut through to the heart of this disaster, the only universal fact was that Helena had lied. She had stolen money and deceived Myka and run away. Innocent people didn’t run. And now she was hiding, lying, maybe even making Claudia lie for her.

            Pete pulled into the airport parking lot and stood watching planes fly overhead while Myka gathered her overnight bag. The air was sharp and cold in Pittsburgh at night. Myka had left her coat open, and the wind ripped through her.

            “You okay?” Pete asked.

            “Yeah,” Myka said, because she so didn’t want to have this conversation with him. Then again, she might be giving off signals, and that needed to stop, so she casually asked, “Why?”

            Pete watched the steam of her question curl up and fade before he looked her in the eye. “You’re messing with the…” He gestured to his throat, wiggling his fingers. “Necklace thing.”

            Pete had noticed the ring Myka wore right away, but he never said Helena’s name when he referred to it. Myka never referred to it at all. She had developed a nervous habit, though, of sliding Helena’s ring up and down her fingers, and it was too small to pass her second knuckle, so she pressed until the chain it hung from left indentations in her skin.

            “Long day,” Myka told him, and she tucked the ring into her shirt. It was so cold against her chest that it stung.

            Pete shrugged and wondered aloud what sort of food there was in the airport. He stuffed himself in the twenty extra minutes they had before boarding, then fell asleep before the plane had left the ground.

            Every sound was cottony in the air, and the stars were brilliant. Myka sighed into the dead stillness and prodded cautiously at the last unexamined new bruise the day had left her with: the only two reasons Helena would talk to Claudia and not to her, she thought, were that Helena didn’t trust her or didn’t care about her. Both hurt. Myka had had enough hurt.

            So screw HG Wells. Keep an eye on Claudia, keep working, and to hell with Helena, the constant mirage, the Schrodinger’s beloved. She had had enough.

            Myka nodded in resolve, then leaned back and shut her eyes against the sickly yellow light of the redeye flight. She woke up with Helena’s ring imprinted on her palm from gripping it in her sleep. Pete tried to ask, but she told him it didn’t matter. She was fine.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue is from "3... 2... 1..." by Bob Goodman. Nice work, Bob. This episode was painful and lovely.


	10. Blue Glass Bottle

            Harper imagined that there was time. The fright Helena had experienced in the street at Christmas-time had set her back; they’d met twice a week again, instead of once, for two weeks after. She recovered admirably, though, and returned to her normal routine. Her attachment to the case of Joshua’s horn was understandable, and the recklessness she’d shown in snagging it was temporary. Claudia Donovan had assured him that risky consultations would not happen again.

            Helena said she wanted to go back to the Warehouse, eventually. That she couldn’t live in fear of capture for the rest of her life, that she couldn’t be fully accountable or redeemed without facing the Regents. She didn’t say she wanted to see Myka, to apologize, or that she had any hope of salvaging whatever had existed between them. Harper knew enough about her by then to know that Agent Bering was never far from her thoughts; the Warehouse was as much the site of Myka as it was the symbol of Helena’s better days. To want to return there was natural.

            But there was at least a year’s worth of work to do yet, he told himself, and by then, Helena’s mind could easily change. She was mercurial, and lately, restless. There was plenty of time.

            It was February, and he was two weeks into this conviction, when Helena found herself another case.

 

 

 

            “God in heaven, what’s happened to you?” Helena exclaimed when she found Andre on her doorstep, unshaven and red-eyed.

            Andre hugged his stomach as he stood and followed Helena into her apartment.

            “Martin’s in jail again. Says he don’t know what happened to him, woke up in cuffs.”

            “Woke up?” Helena settled them both on the couch and tried to win the war between herself and Agent Wells. “And he has no idea at all what happened to him?”

            “Cops say he freaked out, like he was tripping or something. He was meeting the parole officer, and he tried to run. Cop grabbed him, Martin hit him. Not hard! Didn’t even bruise. Martin says it’s like he was dreaming.”

            Agent Wells frowned. “Dreaming about what?”

            Andre shook his head and hugged himself tighter. Helena squeezed his knee and offered to make tea, waiting until he nodded to leave his side. She leaned against the stove once the kettle was on, trying to release her tension and think without worrying Andre. He might intrude, and Helena wanted to be clear and certain.

            Strange things happened every day. Intuition, déjà vu, the majestic mysteries at the edge of modern science that hadn’t yet been explained, these were part of ordinary life. None of these things, however, prickled the hair on Helena’s neck the way ghost stories wound up children before the final frightening blow. She was a veteran Warehouse agent; she knew trouble before she saw it. Andre was describing an artifact.

            The question was, what could she do about it?

            The kettle whistled, and Helena set to making tea. She could take care of Andre, try to find a way to ping the Warehouse, and stay out of sight. Now was not the time to take risks, to get involved.

            Andre leaned forward a bit to reach for his tea, and his coat writhed. Helena started back in alarm, ready to leap for her static bags, her little vial of neutralizer, but a cat pushed its head out under Andre’s chin.

            “You have a cat,” Helena said.

            “It’s Martin’s,” Andre explained. “Picked her up when he called me, ‘cause she shouldn’t be alone, you know?”

            “You’re a cat person,” Helena said, trying and failing to hide her disdain.

            “What you got against cats?”

            Helena chuckled. “I have a distant memory of being scratched by my aunt’s cat. Brutus, I believe he was called. My brother Charles, however, maintained that there was simply no room large enough to accommodate both a cat’s ego and my own.”

            Andre smiled, and Helena pretended she didn’t see the cat drink out of his teacup while he petted it. “Silly kitty” was all he said to it about that. Then he drank from the same cup, and Helena couldn’t stop her eyes from rolling.  

            “Martin always looked out for me,” Andre said. “We got transferred at the same time, you know prison, you get moved around sometimes. And it was cold, and nobody gives a shit. Now I had an idea about the kind of people who went to prison, and Martin said he’d make me tea, ‘cause I’d catch a cold. And I thought he was crazy, and I was stuck in a cell with this crazy guy all weekend. He took a plastic cup with water and his shoelace, and he tied it under the light bulb, and it boiled!”

            “That’s brilliant,” Helena said.

            “I told him to come here. Told him it’d be a fresh start.”

            The cat butted his chin for attention. Andre hugged it and took a ragged breath.

            Helena spent half an hour convincing him that Martin’s mess wasn’t his fault, and another ten minutes pulling as much information out of him as she could. Martin, Andre confirmed, had not taken drugs since his arrest many years ago, and he had never been violent towards another person. He had, however, been arrested with excessive force; he’d spent his first night in jail holding a paper towel to his badly scraped chin. Agent Wells sifted through the artifacts she knew were still at liberty while she stirred pasta sauce on the stove, chewed possibilities while Andre chewed spaghetti across the table from her.

            “Would it be possible for me to speak to your friend?” she asked when they’d finished.

            Andre looked up from feeding the cat a scrap of meatball to ask, “Why?”

            “Because…” Helena ran a hand through her hair and answered carefully. “Because your friend’s story sounds familiar to me, in a way. It resembles the sort of trouble I used to deal with before.”

            Before when, Helena didn’t need to specify. Still, Andre had questions, and Helena could see him struggle to contain them before he told her, “You can write him a letter.”

            Helena set to it right away. Certain as she was, she dared tell the man she might help him, if only he would answer her a few questions, such as recalling in detail what happened before his dream-like state overcame him, where he had been, and if there had been anything out of place there before he lost control. Andre took the letter when she’d finished and scanned it.

            “Anything old?” he muttered. “Today is yesterday? Wait, fudge? Man, what does this have to do with it?”

            Helena opened her mouth, but she had no response.

            “I’m gonna try everything. PTSD, seizures, anything that could have happened. But this don’t make no sense. I ain’t got time for this.”

            Andre scooped the cat up from the floor and left. Helena put her face in her hands and groaned. At least, she thought, it wasn’t quite five o’clock in South Dakota.

 

 

 

            “No,” Claudia hissed into her cell phone. Pete and Myka had already clattered downstairs for dinner, bickering between themselves, but Steve might come looking for her any minute, and she did not want to have to get past the human lie detector. Especially since he was kind of cool. Okay, really cool.

            HG was spinning a story about her friend Andre and his inventive friend and that guy’s cat, and how the American criminal justice system was simply unfair, and Claudia had to put her foot down before she got sucked in.

            “No way, HG! Thorndike tore me a new one for getting you involved in a case; I am not going to let him yell at me again for helping you get involved in another artifact shenanigan. That guy is scary, okay? And he’s right; it’s too dangerous. I am not going to check this out in the digital Warehouse database, I’m seriously not going to look for a paper trail, and I’m not going to google it because it’s stupid for you to get mixed up in this. I believe you when you say I won’t get in trouble, but HG, you will. It sucks, I’m sorry about the cat, but just stay out of it.”

            Helena was silent.

            “Please?” Claudia begged.

            “Right,” Helena answered. “Enjoy your dinner, then.”

            She hung up, and Claudia should have known better than to argue with someone like her. God, HG was stupid. Which really shouldn’t be so cool.

 

 

 

            Helena left her apartment for the auto shop only, and it was the kind of departure from true life that others experience while sleeping. The rest of her days, until she drifted off upright on the couch, were spent with library books piled up to her knees, sifting through them for the history of significant objects of trauma and fury. Post-it notes, color coded, stuck out of the best resources, and every one had cross-references scribbled on it. She hadn’t spoken to anyone, hadn’t done anything but read.

            She sat, flanked by dishes from last night and the night before, eating peaches directly from the can and reading about the Incredible Hulk, a green creature known for blackout rages. A book about anger had used the term “hulking out,” which had led her to the comic books, and it was possible that Martin had held a copy of the first “Incredible Hulk” comic, but it was more likely that the original was in the Warehouse already. There had been a television series, and acting, the duality of self and character, could occasionally manifest such tremendous emotional power that any given scene could produce an artifact. Helena had watched an hour’s worth of clips of the original television series and was as yet unimpressed. Still, there could be _something._

A knock on the door made her slop peach juice on her shirt. She leapt over a stack of books and flung the door wide. When Andre saw her, his face shifted from anxiety to repulsed shock.

            “Man, when’d you wash yourself last?”

            Helena counted the days of the week while she looked down at her dirty shirt. She hadn’t changed that for two days, she knew, and so the last shower must have been before then. Eventually she simply shrugged.

            “I’ve never really been left to my own devices before,” she said. “Apparently I’m a slob, which is fascinating! Was there something you needed, darling? Come in, I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

            Since Martin, Helena thought, but she didn’t need to say it. Andre came in with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t quite look at her while he spoke.

            “I think I need to apologize for that. ‘Cause I went to my parole meeting today, and… Look, I don’t know what this means, exactly, but, I smelled fudge.”

            Helena went rigid. “In your parole officer’s office?”

            Andre nodded.

            “And do you and Martin share a...”

            He was nodding before she finished the question. She scrabbled through her mountain of books, opening some of them and stacking them anew on the couch.

            “I want you to have a look at these pictures, see if you recognize any of these things, in the office or anywhere else you and Martin both have been. If nothing rings a bell, just write a list of everything in that office that you touched, anything that was new, or out of place. I’m going to take a shower, and then I’ll get this sorted.”

            Andre sat down among her dishes, books, and notes, blinking.

            “What if I can’t think of anything?”

            “Then I’ll go in blind,” Helena answered, and she shut the bathroom door on his bemusement.

            When she tumbled out in a towel a few moments later, she shouted over her shoulder to him to tell her what he’d thought of.

            “I touched the door handle.”

            “And?” Helena demanded while she tugged on her best slacks in the bedroom.

            “It ain’t my office, Helena. I don’t go around touching stuff.”

            He blushed when Helena came out of her room with her blouse only half buttoned, but she ignored it.

            “And what happened, exactly, when you smelled fudge? Did you go into a dream state, as Martin described?”

            Andre stared at her while she crouched over an air vent and began to pry it up.

            “Yeah. It wasn’t specific, but I knew where I was.”

            “And?”

            He hesitated for only a moment before he answered, “I was pulling the trigger. It wasn’t a dream. It was a nightmare.”

            “A nightmare you’d experienced?” Helena asked.            

            Andre nodded, and it was horrible, to think of this dear boy going through that murder again. Helena reached down into the vent in her floor and pulled out an envelope wrapped in packing tape; flicked open her pocket knife (not the one that had killed McPherson, because she’d thrown that away long ago) and cut the envelope open.

            “Martin had a dream,” Helena said, stringing the facts together, “and he reacted in self-defense, as though someone were going to hurt him. Indeed, during what I imagine was a nightmare of an arrest, someone did. And you remembered… It’s not rage at all. It’s a trigger of some kind.”

            She rocked back on her heels and rifled through the envelope. It held everything she owned that could identify her: a page of Christina’s handwriting, a letter from an old lover, and three photographs.

            “Rage?” Andre asked. “Is that why you’re looking at _Avengers_ comics? And what the hell is that?”

            “It was, yes,” Helena said in answer to his first question, but she ignored the other.

            Helena chanced a look at the photo Claudia had stolen for her, of herself and Wooley, but she didn’t look at the others. One was of herself and Myka in the instant before local law enforcement chased them off the pedestal of a city monument in Kansas; the other was the first photograph Helena had ever taken, of Myka curled up and reading in an armchair. She didn’t need all that right now. What she needed was the silver badge and leather wallet.  

            “Hey, what are you doing?” Andre said.

            Helena put the envelope away and sealed the vent.

            “Retrieving my Secret Service identification.”

            Andre was staring at her when at last she looked at him.

            “It’s expired,” was the only explanation she could conceive of. It was a terrible one. Honestly, for someone who’d secretly managed to almost destroy the world, she ought to have been a better improvisational liar. But then, every lie she’d told in this century she’d spent years perfecting in the centuries before. She turned away from Andre, muttering, “If it’s a trigger, I should get ice. Might ward off the effects for a moment, at least.”

            “So you’re a British ex-Secret Service convict who pops up and deals with freaky shit that smells like fudge?”

            “Essentially.”

            “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

            Helena shoved a static bag in one pocket of her best coat, then filled a small zip-lock bag with ice and slipped it into the other. She flashed Andre a smile while she tugged on her magnetic boots.

            “Let’s just see this parole office, then, shall we?”

 

 

            The North Fulton Parole Office was one small doorway in a long, red brick strip mall. For such a place, and on the edge of a main drag no less, it was quiet and clean, with what must have been beautiful landscaping in the spring. Helena glanced around it, noting every passer-by while she followed Andre across the parking lot.

            “Tell me about your parole officer,” she asked.

            “Sandy Espinal, been on the force for twenty-five years. Her parents were from Honduras, overstayed their visas. Sandy wants to make a difference, and she sure as hell makes one for us. You remember how hard it is, getting back out in the world? Sandy makes it better.”

            “Hobbies, habits, collectibles?”

            Andre shrugged. “She ain’t my friend, man. Just come on in here.” He held the door, then waved to the woman at the front desk. “Hey Marie. Officer Espinal still here?”

            The woman smiled and flipped through a schedule book. “Sure is. And she should be free.”

            “Excellent,” Helena said, her fingers pressing Andre’s wrist to hold him back. “Thank you, Mr. Ojara. Marie.”

            She strode toward the office door marked “Espinal,” knocked, and flashed her badge when a voice told her to come in.

            “Agent Wells, Secret Service. I apologize for the intrusion, but I wonder if you could spare a moment to answer a question or two?”

            Officer Espinal looked up from a pile of paperwork, the lines of her frown carved deep into her face. There was a dusting of freckles on her tan skin, but it was the only particularly friendly thing about her.

            “Depends on the question, Agent Wells,” she said.

            Helena tucked her badge away, smirking.

            “I received word of an incident here involving one of your parolees. Martin Johnson? He had a kind of fit, as I understand.”

            Officer Espinal nodded curtly.

            “Do you have any information about what may have happened, exactly?”

            “Does the Secret Service have any information about why they care?”

            Helena smiled freely now. She loved this kind of woman.

            “The Secret Service deals in federal theft, among other things, and we have reason to believe that stolen and distributed federal goods may have ended up in your possession.”

            Espinal raised an eyebrow.

            “Through no fault of your own,” Helena clarified. “Goods which may cause a kind of… allergic reaction in a select population…”

            She droned on, glancing surreptitiously around the office while Officer Espinal leaned back in her desk chair, unimpressed. There was a bookshelf crammed with three-ring binders, inelegantly stuffed with papers, a filing cabinet with multiple locks, and almost no personal touches. It was a mess of official processes.

            “Is there anything new in this office? Anything antique, in particular?”

            “Such as?” Officer Espinal sighed.

            Just as Helena began to worry that Espinal was going to have her arrested for some kind of fraud or elaborate pranking, the officer shifted, and Helena’s eyes landed on a slender blue glass bottle in the window behind the desk.

            At first, she could smell fudge, rich and heady. Then fog clouded her vision, the clang of machinery deafened her, and all she could smell was bronze. It clamped down on her chest. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart wasn’t beating. She couldn’t move, she must have died. Dear god, she couldn’t possibly be dying. The Regents hadn’t said she might die. And she didn’t; she hung there, crushed between one breath and the next, and her chest would never rise again, nor fall to expel the scream lodged in her throat. The greatest horror was the silence, the utter stillness. It made her question even the existence of her panic. She couldn’t cry or fight. No one would see or know. She was alive and had ceased to exist. No one had told her being bronzed would feel like this.

            Cold bit into her fingers, and she gasped in air as her vision seeped back around the edges. Helena crushed the ice in her pocket and thanked heaven and Dr. Thorndike for sensory intervention. A shard of ice ripped the plastic bag, and cold water seeped through her jacket and shirt. She pressed the damp fabric to her skin and breathed deeply. It wasn’t real. The office, the artifact, Officer Espinal’s scowling worry, was real.

            “Where did you get that bottle?” Helena demanded, staggering toward the window.

            Espinal spun her chair. “Yard sale. You okay, ma’am?”

            Helena waved a hand before snapping on gloves and shaking out her static bag.

            “’Yard sale’ isn’t code for black market,” the officer said.

            “No, no, the thieves seem to have taken a sample of the allergen and then scattered the objects so their location would be difficult to pinpoint and we’d chase a number of red herrings before we found the right track. Clever plan.”

            _Should write a book about it,_ Helena thought before she asked Espinal to cover her eyes. The bottled flung sparks to every corner of the office. One of them singed her collarbone, and the pain, combined with the neutralizing of the artifact, washed the last of the nightmarish effects away.

            “If you’d like to be compensated, you’re free to send a request to our office in Denver,” Helena panted, and she shook Officer Espinal’s hand and darted out of the building, dragging Andre behind her.

           

 

 

            Andre and Officer Espinal went to bat for Martin, and Dr. Calder, after some cajoling, wrote an official CDC letter stating that the man had been temporarily ill during his incident. The case was dismissed, and Claudia hacked in and destroyed the record, just in case.

            Harper was worried, but he kept quiet about it. It was almost Valentine’s Day, Clea wanted sweets and a party, and any day justice was served was a day to celebrate. Helena brought the two boys over for dinner. They clattered inside, puffing and shivering from the cold outside, and Clea ran to greet them while Lee Mai yelled after her to come back and help set the table. She didn’t, but Helena carried her back to the dining room and assisted Lee Mai one-handed.

            Andre had informed the Thorndikes about Martin’s favorite foods. When it was served, he began talking to Lee Mai loudly to cover the fact that Martin was crying into his lasagna and bell peppers.

            _Three black men at a table, and two of them have been to prison_. _Those numbers ain’t quite fair,_ Harper thought, but he kept it to himself until the company had migrated to the living room with hot chocolate in oversized mugs. The children had painted them, and Martin seemed to become absorbed in every brush stroke when Andre started explaining what it was like to bring him home from jail. Harper was about to intervene when he caught Helena’s eye. She’d been studying Martin, and she stood fluidly.

            “You’re a tinkerer, as I understand,” Harper heard her say. “Come, I’d like to show you something.”

            She led Martin to the pile of toys in the corner, fished out a few of her gadgets, and the two of them played and talked at the table across the room. Martin relaxed quickly. So did Harper, despite the fact that Helena’s languid posture was a lie. She buzzed with energy, and her eyes were too attentive for simple conversation; she was thinking. But Harper turned his attention to Andre and didn’t wonder about it.

            When Martin left, he had hearts in his eyes. Helena didn’t seem to have noticed, and Andre looked like he was going to give the poor man a stern talking-to about the futility of that particular pursuit.

            “What’s his color mean, Daddy?” Clea asked when they left.

            Harper scooped her up, saying, “It means he has a crush. And thank you for asking me and not him. Do you want to show me the color with your crayons before you go to bed?”

            Clea was enthusiastic, and thank god for it. Getting her upstairs and in bed was half the battle, even when she was this exhausted. She wouldn’t even stop rubbing her nose to hug Helena properly.

            “I’ll get a start on the dishes,” Helena said when Clea showed no interest in being put to bed by her.

            Harper nodded and left her in the kitchen. Upstairs, his daughter’s bed was bathed in winter moonlight, and she only asked for one story before she fell asleep, warm and soft in a pile of quilts and stuffed ducks. Lee Mai was asleep, too, when Harper checked on them, so there was no begging for five more minutes on the computer. Everything was quiet. Harper pressed a kiss on his fingers and tapped his children’s doorknobs before he crept back downstairs.

            Quiet as he was, Helena heard him.

            “Harper?” she called, soft but clear and firm.

            She was standing at the sink when Harper came into the kitchen. Her waistcoat was wrinkled from a long stretch of wear, and her blouse was rolled up to her elbows. Bubbles from the dish soap clung as high as halfway up her forearms. She must have tied her hair up after she’d started, because there were streaks of water shooting through the messy bun. She turned her head only slightly, just enough to see him behind her, before she spoke.

            “It’s time.”

            The way she watched him, there was no way to deny that he knew what she meant.

            “Now?”

            Helena sighed. She grabbed a dishtowel, dried her hands before she turned around. She had threatened to leave before; she’d explained it to him gently, soft and slow. There was nothing soft about her now. Leaning against the edge of the sink, her hair falling down from its bun, waistcoat open and shirt spattered with water drops, she still looked like the edge of a knife.

            “You got a plan?” he asked her.

            “Of course. I thought we might take a few days to build a case, gather up the notes you have, my diary, perhaps a statement from Andre, and Lou down at the auto shop, regarding my character. And then we’ll call Mr. Kosan. I assume you know how to reach him.”

            “The Regents will rip you apart.”

            “Perhaps. It rather depends on whether I can prove I’m more valuable to them in one piece.” Helena watched her fingers wander along the counter before she said, “I imagine it would be best for you to make the call. It would show them that you’re actively doing what’s best for the organization as a whole, reduces the contrast between your service to me and to them.”

            Harper shook his head. “I can’t do that, Hel.”

            She looked up at him then. For a moment, they didn’t move. Harper felt like she was rearranging his insides, trying to make them look the way she needed them to.

            “Fine,” she said at last. “I’ll do it. But I need your help. We need to think through this rationally, if I’m to have that fighting chance you promised me.”

            “Your best chance is here,” Harper told her. “You have a family, Helena, people who love and protect you, a life, a future.”

            “Do I?” Helena scoffed and tossed the dishtowel aside, her arm sweeping toward the window, the world. “Do I truly have anything that’s mine? Anything at all that doesn’t depend on the whim and will of the Regents? Harper, if they find me, if they _ever_ find me, all of this will be gone, and there’s nothing I can do because I have no claim to it. Turning myself in is the only act of agency I have. It’s the only way I can ever say to anyone that my life belongs to me!”

            She took a breath to stop her shouting before she continued. “There’s never been much I could claim, you know that. I stole what I could of what was forbidden: education, trousers, sex. Christina was my child, and I loved her more than my own life, but our children belong to themselves. The only thing that was fully, rightfully mine was my place at the Warehouse. Agent Helena Wells, all the parts of me at last in one place. I’ve lost a great deal, Harper, but I could have that back.”

            “Or they could bronze you.” Harper waited, but Helena just crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Is being here really so bad that you’d risk that? I mean, aren’t you afraid? That bottle you snagged shows you your worst nightmare, and…”

            “Wrong. It shows you what you fear about the future. Martin was attacked by police officers, and he fears it could happen again. Andre may always be afraid that he could kill another person. Harper, if the bottle only wanted to show me my worst nightmare, it could do better than that. A man delivered a telegram stating that my daughter had been murdered, and then I went back in time and held her while she died. I’ve been a monster, I’ve almost killed everything I ever loved, for god’s sake, and you think my greatest horror is the bronze?”

            Helena pulled her locket from underneath her shirt, as if what she had to say couldn’t be said without it.

            “Christina is dead. McShane and McPherson are dead, and so is the monster I once was. All these things are in the past; you helped put them there! The bronze is the only thing that still has hold of my future. To face it is my only escape.”

            She didn’t say much else before she left for the night. The unwashed dishes languished in the sink while she buttoned her waistcoat and took her jacket down from its hook by the door. It was late, too cold for such a thin coat, but she didn’t flinch when the wind howled through the open door. Harper could barely stand to let her go.

 


	11. Limbo Prison

            Claudia hated this kind of thing, just standing around waiting. She had no idea what to say, and HG wasn’t making any effort to engage her. They were both out in the Thorndikes’ backyard, Claudia on a swing, rocking nervously while HG looked up at that stars. It was fracking cold outside, too.

            HG had told her not to come, that it would be better. She was trying to play this whole thing so Claudia and the doc would get off scot-free, and her staying in South Dakota and pretending she didn’t care was part of that plan. The conversation had ended with Claudia saying, “Right. See you this weekend, then!” and hanging up while HG laughed. Thorndike hadn’t taken any of HG’s outs, either. Only Dr. Vanessa had, and Claudia understood that; if Artie found out she’d been involved in this, he’d be super pissed.

            Claudia scuffed her toe in the frozen ground and tried not to say the same things HG had heard for days on end: you don’t have to do this, we’ll protect you, please don’t go. They’d all said it, over and over while they helped her sort through therapy notes, photographs of her with Thorndike’s kids, and records of all the happy people who’d bought her little machines. Part of her therapy process had been telling the story of her traumas, detailed and clear as she could manage. The final telling was recorded on cassette tapes. Those went into the cardboard box for the Regents, too, and man, it had to be rough letting a whole bunch of strangers listen to something so intimate. Everybody else got to keep that stuff confidential.

            Andre and HG’s boss wrote statements about her character for the box. Her boss thought it was a letter of recommendation for college, and Andre was told she was applying for asylum in the US, which was closer to the truth. Claudia had brought official Warehouse paperwork so she and HG could do field reports about Joshua’s horn, Lizzie Borden’s compact, and the blue glass bottle. And that was pretty much all they could do.

            They’d sat in the living room, listening, while HG made the call to Kosan. She’d offered to go somewhere else to get picked up, keep the mess out of Thorndike’s house, but Thorndike wanted it on his turf. Figured they’d be less likely to get rough with her while his kids were in bed upstairs. So HG called, and she told them she’d be waiting.

            “I’m so glad it’s clear tonight,” she said suddenly, and Claudia looked up at her. She had her neck craned back, staring up. “The best thing I could imagine doing was to look at the stars. I only wish they were so vivid in this city as they are at the Warehouse.”

            She sighed, and her breath puffed out like a dragon’s. Claudia still didn’t know what to say.

            “I’ll be alright, Claudia.”

            “You don’t know that!” Claudia said, standing up and stomping toward her. “How can you just stand here and…”

            HG looked at her and frowned. She was sad and scared and Claudia wanted to tell her there was still time to run, but she wouldn’t do it.

            “The stars are nice,” Claudia said. HG nodded and turned her eyes back to them.

            Tires crunched up the driveway. Claudia flung herself at HG, and the woman petted her hair and held her close.

            “I do hope I get to see you reach your destiny, darling,” she said. “It will surely be a glorious one.”

            Claudia wasn’t sure about that, but there was a lot of noise at the front of the house, and HG had to go. When the back door closed behind her, Claudia sank down onto the swing set again and watched the way her tears shattered the stars.

 

 

            Helena had refused the company of anyone except Harper when the Regents came, because she didn’t want the others to see. Harper wasn’t sure he wanted to see it himself.

            When the van pulled up in his driveway, he opened the door and stood with his hands on the doorframe.

            “My children are sleeping. Come in, but quietly, please.”

            Adwin Kosan nodded and waved to the officers who followed him to keep it down. Harper let them pass him one by one in the same instant that Helena came down the hallway, hands open and out in front of her. One officer leapt forward, grabbed one wrist and jerked her around backward. Harper flinched. She was cuffed and being walked toward the door before Harper had a chance to reach her. He clung to her as long as the officers would let him, twining his fingers between hers behind her back so she could squeeze them; it was the only contact she could manage.

            “Evidence,” he said while they took her out the door, and he handed the box of papers to Adwin. He took it without question and left. The second he had climbed into the van, it backed up and vanished down the street.

            They had never delved too far into Christina’s death; Helena wasn’t ready for that quite yet. But she had mentioned, once, the horrible sound that had ripped through her when the telegram came. Harper stared out into the empty street, dead quiet in the witching hour of the night, and wished he could let a sound like that escape. It would deafen the whole block.

           

 

            “Mister Valda,” Helena said when the man sat across from her at the table she was cuffed to. “The presiding scholar of Warehouse 2. A pleasure to meet you, sir.”

            She could understand why Pete had paranoid delusions about Benedict Valda while in the thrall of an artifact. The man had the grimmest face she’d ever seen, uneclipsed by hair and unsoftened by any hint of dimples or lines, even if he had reason to smile at her. His eyes were small and wide, and Helena was painfully visible in the light that glared off white walls and steel furniture.

            She turned from him to the middle-aged white woman who’d come in behind him. Her hair was short, in that sharp, elegant way many women these days favored, and there was a scent so permanent on her that it filled the room: cooking oil, Helena believed.

            “And you are?” she asked the woman.

            “None of your concern,” Valda rumbled, motioning the woman to sit in the other chair. She did, and flipped open a small notebook. Helena nodded to her and turned back to Valda, because clearly he wanted her full attention.

            “Very well,” she told him. “Where would you like to begin?”

 

           

            Helena had spent little more than two days in Regent custody after her arrest in Moscow, but their facility was the sort of place that left an impression. The walls, floor, and ceiling were utterly white, and the light gleamed off them so strongly Helena feared for her vision. Every piece of furniture was bolted down, and it was all steel. There was a pair of handcuffs permanently fixed to the table on one side. Everything was set out, assumed, and there was nothing Helena could do but wait and know that she was being watched. Being in a cell here, less than ten strides square, was like being pinned to a dissection table.

 

 

            Valda was slow getting to it. He flipped through pages of notes, rubbed his stubbled chin, and leaned forward as if his head were a bit difficult to hold up. For a man of his importance, Helena thought, he had dreadful posture. There again, no guess could be made as to his background; he was a Regent, and that one fact which she knew only made him more opaque.

            “The Regents have reviewed the documentation that was presented to us upon your arrest,” Valda finally said, “and we have a few additional questions.”

            “I imagined you would,” Helena answered.

            The woman was writing down everything being said. Helena tried not to watch her, tried harder not to covet her pen. God, there had been nothing at all to do for days.

            “You contacted Dr. Harper Thorndike when, exactly, Miss Wells?”

            “On the fifth of June, last year.”

            “Approximately eight months ago?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “How extensively have you traveled during those eight months?”

            “Traveled?” Helena cocked her head. “I haven’t traveled at all, sir. I was in Atlanta.”

            Valda frowned. “Is there someone who can verify this?”

            He wandered through a list of dates, asking where she was when. Some of the dates were from before June, before her reinstatement. None of them meant anything to her. Helena began fiddling with the mechanisms of the handcuffs, locking and unlocking them while trying not to draw attention to the activity. Fear could only hold out so long in a place like this before boredom set in. Shortly after boredom came agitation.

            “And on the thirty-first of October, you were where?”

            “I was trick-or-treating with Clea Thorndike in _Atlanta._ Is there a point to this?”            

            When Valda made eye contact with the stenographer woman, Helena nearly choked on desperation. She shouldn’t push, shouldn’t get angry, but her life was in the balance and she didn’t know what these people wanted her to do to save it.

            “Is this some sort of test? To establish credibility of some kind? You might be better served employing Agent Jinks to see if I’m lying, unless of course Claudia’s exaggerated his abilities.”

            Valda and the stenographer stared for a moment, then stood almost in unison. It would be exceptionally clever, Helena thought, to give Regents in these situations a telepathy artifact.

            Helena pounded on the table until her fists left dents in the pristine surface. She had waited five days, alone in a cage, for that useless interview.

 

 

            “Have you ever been to Smith Lake, in Alabama, Miss Wells?”

            Helena tried not to roll her eyes. “No. I’ve only been to Point Clear.”

            Valda laid out photographs, one by one, like a police officer on a television drama. Everything he did was so dramatic Helena wanted to throttle him; she opened and shut her handcuffs instead.

            The pictures showed an enormous white house with wide, tall windows and a wooden dock protruding into glassy green water; a shoreline with pebbles visible through the clean, lapping waves; a smooth bend in the lake, wrapping around a steep, tree-lined embankment; and a motorboat of some kind.

            “It’s beautiful,” Helena said. She ran her fingertips along the edge of one photo and wondered if there was any water like this nearby, if there had been any sunlight to shimmer on it like in these pictures. God, it had been more than a week since she had seen the sun.

            The thought made her start to choke, in the way she’d been struggling to fight off every day. It tasted bitter, like the fury she’d kept in attendance in the bronze, just to make her heart pound and kick against her ribs. Valda left her alone for a day or more, then brought this drivel before her like this was some sort of psychological study. Helena wanted to scream.

            But outbursts, satisfying as they might be, would not serve her. She cleared her throat, swallowed past the lump of anger, and asked, “Is there something I’m supposed to be seeing in these pictures?” as evenly as she could manage.

            Valda threw another photograph on top of the others. Helena’s stomach heaved. She shut her eyes and gulped in air until the nausea passed, then looked at Valda, only Valda, not down.

            There was a woman in this picture, dark-skinned, perhaps sixty if the shock of white hair was any indication. She was nearly butchered, laying in a tangled mass of lacerations and blood in the clear, shallow water.

            “What happened?” Helena asked. “Did… Did the boat do that, or… God, stop it.”

            They were asking her about a murder. Possibly more than one, based on the range of dates. She shoved the photographs away from her and closed her eyes again. If they thought she could do this, Helena realized, she was lost.

            A shuffling of paper, footsteps, and she assumed the Regents were gone. When she opened her eyes, the stenographer woman was standing at the door, watching her.

            “You okay, honey?” she asked.

            “Been better,” Helena told her.

 

 

            Helena dreamed that the mutilated old woman invited her into the beautiful white house on the lake. She left bloody fingerprints on all the wide, clean windows, and Helena tried to force herself awake, but her depression pulled her under, and she drowned in nightmares until the Regents came again.

 

 

            Until this moment, Myka’s closest encounter with a video game had been dying extremely fast in Smash Bros and watching Pete and Claudia try to best each other for half an hour each round. Neither of them had ever really taken the time to teach her how to do anything except mash buttons and tell her how badly she was losing. Now, thanks to Beatrix Potter’s tea set, Myka was running through a real-life video game, trying not to think about what she was afraid of. Great. Not like that was a long, devastating list.

            _Stick to the facts,_ she told herself. _Find the gang, kill the scary things, get the controllers, get gone. Man, this is not the sweet animal stories I remember._

            Myka remembered having a set of miniature Beatrix Potter books, and her father had read them to her every night.

            _Until I lost one,_ Myka thought with a shudder, and apparently, that was all it took.

            “What the hell are you doing, Myka?” her father yelled. “You think you can navigate this crazy place? Get over here now! You can’t even keep up with a little book, for god’s sake. Can’t even keep up with people you love, how do you expect to…”

            Myka skidded to a stop and shouted back, “Are you serious right now? Look at me! I’m a total badass!”

            Her father dissolved into zeroes and ones, and it should not have been that easy. It was the truth, though; this game’s character designs were amazing. Every move she made was accompanied by the swish of an elegant cape, and her Boots of the Huntress gave her plus ten stamina, which apparently meant she could run forever. Myka grinned. If only she could keep them. And maybe the corset, too, because she wasn’t Pete, but holy Tetons.

            Not that there’d be anyone else to enjoy it, Myka thought. One waver, just one, and god, when did her willpower get so crappy? There again, not thinking about what you’re afraid of while trying not to get killed by all of the above is kind of a tall order; pink elephants were easier to forget about.

            Somewhere deep in the maze, the sound of a fist through drywall echoed. Helena was coming.

            _Not that. Anything but that,_ Myka thought, and she dreamed up another terror, focused on it until the screaming faded.

            And then she heard Claudia screaming. Myka doubled her speed, tromping on a sea of tentacles to get to her team.

 

 

            Valda asked what Helena’s days in Atlanta had been like. She told him how she had read _Trauma and Recovery_ like a saint reads her bible; recited the list of aspects of healthy communication like the alphabet, because Harper had spent a week with her on that alongside their regular therapy sessions; and almost forgot herself and stood to demonstrate the sort of sparring she had taught Lee Mai on weekends.

            She was docile. She took in the smells that clung to the stenographer’s clothing and hair, the fine craftsmanship of Valda’s suit jackets, because she feared, every moment, the day when it would end. All she hoped was that they’d march her through the outdoors on her way to the bronzer, so she could see the sun again. It had been ten days by now.

            More and more, she slept. Even when she woke, it was often only for a moment, because her joints ground like a mortar and pestle when she tried to move, and when she didn’t move, she fell asleep again. Helena didn’t fight as much as perhaps she ought; oblivion was a privilege she would soon lose, as well. On the other hand, at least the end of sleep would mean the end of nightmares.

            On some days, the guards had to shake her awake before they could cuff her and let the Regents in.

           

 

            “You were aware, upon your release from the Bronze Sector, of the location of two artifacts: the Minoan trident, and Borden’s compact. Are there any others that you’d located before your incident in Delphi?”

            “The Corsican vest is in Fort Lauderdale.”

            “Any others?”

            “No, sir.”

 

 

            “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know these people.”

            Day thirteen. Three men, less brutally dead than the woman but never the less, were displayed in front of her.

            “You can’t tell us anything at all about the circumstances of their deaths?” Valda pressed.

            The stenographer shifted in her chair and scowled at the man. She had become less in tune with him over the past few visits, slower to rise, longer to linger in Helena’s cell. Helena, foggy as she was, tried her best to watch the woman, because her dulled senses still jangled with the feeling that something was wrong.

            “I can take a look,” Helena said, scooting the photographs closer to her with her fingertips, because perhaps it was a test. Perhaps she was supposed to solve a case, prove through her skills that she had nothing to do with these deaths. Maybe if she could find the answer, the right answer, to all of these questions, the Regents would finally make their decision about her.

            She started with the man lying nude on a table. His body was heavily tattooed, but there was still visible bruising.

            “These marks here,” Helena said, resisting the urge to unchain herself and point. “I believe it may be purpura, a specific type of bruising consistent with disease. Typhus, perhaps, or scurvy. He clearly didn’t know Chinese, or else he’s a bit over-fond of sausage, because these characters are… wait.”

            Barely visible under a stain of purple and red, was the eye of Horus on the man’s left breast.

            Helena’s blood ran cold, and she scrambled through the photographs. One of the men was face down, but the third was slumped in a chair, and he wore a pin on his shirt that matched the one on Valda’s jacket. The stenographer had one, too.

            She leaned back in her chair as best she could without moving her hands and watched the fear glow brighter in these two people’s eyes.

            “Someone is killing Regents,” Helena said.

            Neither person moved. Helena sighed.

            “Is the Warehouse making any headway on this?”

            Valda frowned, saying, “The Warehouse handles artifacts, Miss Wells. A series of human accidents is no concern of theirs.”

            “Accidents?” Helena echoed. “What on earth are you badgering me about them for if they’re just accidents? Hadn’t you rather be sorting out whether or not I could be of any use to you and getting on with your lives?”

            The stenographer looked to Valda, who was glowering at Helena. He hunched over so that Helena felt like she loomed over the man. She tried to leverage that, to hit on the question that would bend him so much he broke and told her something. Because she needed to know.

            “Are they accidents, really? If you truly assumed so, why would you accuse me of murder?”

            “Perhaps because you’re a murderer,” Valda growled.

            Helena spread the photographs as best she could, turned them so they faced Valda.

            “I didn’t do this. You know I didn’t.” She waited, and when the Regents said nothing, she pressed on. “Do you have any idea who might have? Or why? With four Regents dead, how close is this person to the Warehouse, to its agents? And if those agents haven’t been informed that there’s a threat, how are they expected to defend themselves? This work depends on communication, and if you are unwilling…”

            “Back down, Miss Wells,” the stenographer warned.

            Helena rounded on her, barking, “I will not! Not when people I care about are threatened by idiot arrogance!”

            “We are not here to have a criminal tell us how to do our jobs!” Valda roared.

            The stenographer put a hand on his arm, whispered his name, but he was on his feet, leaning into Helena, who was watching his face turn red.

            “Arrogance? You have no respect for authority, nor for any thoughts other than your own. The rules don’t apply to you, do they? You assume you know what’s best, and you act without any input from others. _That_ is arrogance, Wells, and it’s dangerous! Little wonder you thought you had the right to kill.”

            Helena flinched at this. Valda lowered his voice, and it only became more threatening.

            “You are not beyond reproach, Miss Wells, nor discipline. Refuse our authority as you wish, but we are the arbiters of your fate.”

            “And you would risk your agents’ lives for this illusion of control?” Helena sneered.

            The cuffs were open, and she stood, hands spread wide on the table. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw guards storm in, saw the stenographer halt them with an outstretched hand, but her focus was on Valda. She was almost butting heads with him, and she could hear his breath accelerate in fear.

            “The Regents have no authority, Mister Valda. You’re only a pack of civilians pretending you’re not far too deep into a world you don’t understand! I respect the authority of the experts, of the people who go out every day into this world you try to rule and actually tame it! You want answers, Mister Valda? You want to know what’s happened to these men? Ask an agent! Unless you’re too authoritative to consider the input of others.”

            She held his gaze a moment, then stood back and crossed her arms. The stenographer touched Valda’s arm, brave woman, and he finally took a proper breath. He still looked apoplectic enough to explode.

            “It’s frightening,” Helena whispered, and Valda seemed like he could barely hear her for the blood pounding in his ears, but the stenographer wrote it all down. “How can you save the world if you can’t even save your own people? Your own loved ones. Strange how fragile our place in the world is. Please, Mister Valda, don’t let the Warehouse fall because you cannot face what you have lost.”

 

 

            “Whatcha playing, Claud?”

            Myka leaned her hip against the couch, watching Claudia strum her electric guitar. The notes were faint. Claudia shrugged.

            “It’s cool you’re playing in the living room now,” Myka tried again. “I like hearing you. You’re really good.”

            “Thanks.”

            Pete wandered into the room, a plate of cookies in his hand, and tried to talk around a mouthful. Claudia stopped strumming to squint at him.

            “He wants to know if you want a cookie before he finishes them off,” Myka explained. Pete gave her a thumbs-up.

            Claudia shook her head, mumbling, “I’m gonna see what Steve’s up to.”

            She scrambled off the couch and disappeared up the stairs. Myka sighed. Claudia had been like this more or less constantly for two weeks. Nothing anyone tried could get anything out of her, and all Steve would say was that Claudia had begged him not to ask. Myka was the only one who hadn’t completely given up, and now, she was seriously considering it. God, if this was Helena’s fault, Myka was going to kill her.

            Pete actually put a cookie in his mouth before he tried to talk.

            “Igorarigh.”

            “What kind of vibe?” Myka asked him.

            “Iuhno,” Pete said, then swallowed. “Too soon to tell, I guess.”

 

 

            Helena was marched, in both cuffs and zip ties, down a hallway that sloped distinctly upward before it leveled out. She tried to guess the distance and the incline to calculate how far up she’d just been taken. Not exactly an engaging last line of thought, but it kept her from trying to maul the guards and run for her life.

            The mortar between the cinder blocks changed, looked older, and then suddenly there was a heavy armored door. Beyond it was wood-paneled walls and plush carpet. One of the guards stayed behind at the door, and the other uncuffed her hands, cut the ties that bound her, and pointed to a room down the carpeted hall.

            She moved slowly, taking in what she could. Her eyes were unaccustomed to such low light, but she could smell wood lacquer and frequent vacuuming, the kind of scent that lingers heavily in moderately priced hotels. The door of the room, when she pushed it open, was slick with newness under her hands.

            “Miss Wells.”

            Helena shrieked. Mrs. Frederick waited patiently for her to calm herself. She raised an eyebrow when Helena tried to look around her, farther into the room. Only Adwin Kosan and the stenographer were visible, seated at the far end of a long, red wood conference table.

            “Looking for someone?” Mrs. Frederick asked.

            “I-I had requested, if she wished, to see Myka before…” Helena refused to let her voice break. She startled again when Adwin Kosan spoke.

            “And if you were to be punished, Miss Wells, your request would have been granted.”

            Helena felt like the glorious carpeted floor fell out from under her, and she was lighter now than the bronze had ever made her heavy. Odd, she hadn’t prepared herself for this.

            “You expressed an intention to repay the money taken from Warehouse accounts,” Kosan was saying somewhere in the distance. “We would appreciate that, but there is no interest, and no collateral. You are free to go.”

            Helena’s legs would no longer hold her. She staggered toward the nearest chair and collapsed into it. It was a cool black leather thing, studded with brass, and it gave gently under her weight. God bless anything that wasn’t made of metal. The room had windows, she suddenly noticed. They were tightly shuttered, but that was all that barred her from the outside world.

            “Free to go,” Helena said, and she was beaming down the table.

            The stenographer wasn’t smiling. Helena raised an eyebrow.

            “Anywhere except the Warehouse.”

            As suddenly as the floor had fallen, so did the ceiling. Freedom should mean everything, with or without the Warehouse; it did, and yet. Myka. Helena shook her head. Fool, stupid fool to think…

            “Unless.”

            Helena cocked her head sharply. The emotional whiplash alone was putting the color back in her world. She was less than surprised, admittedly, to see these particular colors on the Regents. It took a moment, but she managed to arrange her face into the proper mask of amused curiosity.

            “Unless?”

            Mrs. Frederick settled in a chair close to her. “Your assessment of our current situation is correct, Miss Wells. While the deaths you were informed of may have been accidents, there is a possibility that someone is killing us.”

            “If this is the case,” Kosan said, “we need to understand why. To send in security, or Warehouse agents, to fight an invisible enemy will do little more than lead that enemy to change strategies. His next attack could come from anywhere. You, however, are in a unique position. No one knows where you are, or even _if_ you are.”

            “And you want me to hunt this enemy of yours?”

            “We want you to hunt us,” Mrs. Frederick said.

            “You will be expected to seek out Regents, discover as many as possible in as much detail as you are able without being discovered. The ways in which you do this will be reported to us, and we will use this information to shore up any weakness this predator may be exploiting.”

            Helena bit back her questions and instead muttered only, “Intriguing.”

            Kosan continued. “Alongside this work, we may occasionally call upon you to consult on official matters, and if a particular Regent’s security is clearly threatened, you may be needed to join the ranks of their defense. We will provide you with a base of operations, transportation, and a stipend to cover any other needs. Your personal effects will be returned to you, and unless called upon for specific duties, your movement will be unfettered and self-determined. The only restriction is that you must limit your contact with people to only Mrs. Frederick or myself, over secure lines of communication.”

            “And if all goes well, once this problem has been resolved,” Mrs. Frederick said, and she glanced at Kosan and picked her words carefully before she spoke them. “We may… revisit the question of your relationship with the Warehouse.”

            Helena nearly laughed in their faces. She could have. She was clearly free to leave at any moment, or these three people wouldn’t be sitting at the edge of their seats, waiting for her to say something. If she told them to hang themselves and their bloody offer, they would have no other option.

            There were, however, very few options for her, either. Had they bound her here, tried to threaten her in any way, she would have stormed out into the streets, because if they wanted her to work for them, they had no intention of locking her away. But the Warehouse. Myka. They had given her everything she wanted but the last inch, and this mile they asked her to walk for them seemed so short in comparison.

            She let her body fall loose in her seat, let them think that any moment she might stand and sidle out the door, because if they were offering a trade, then clearly this was a negotiation.

            “Before I agree to anything like this, an understanding must be reached regarding each other’s priorities. You, clearly, wish to protect the lives of yourselves and your colleagues, and to keep this entire operation as hidden as possible, both from your enemies and your subordinates. My priority is the lives of myself and my loved ones, which includes the agents of Warehouse 13. Every decision I must make in the field will take their safety into account before your secrecy.”

            Helena leaned forward easily, her elbows on the table, and tried to smile without looking like a carnivorous beast.

            “If you can respect my priorities, Mr. Kosan, then we have a deal.”

 

 

            Oddly enough, the building she was in actually was a hotel. Adwin Kosan gave her a key card, and by the time Helena had finished showering, her leather duffel had been delivered to the room. She changed clothes for the first time in two weeks and took her room service dinner on the balcony. It was still February, and her wet hair actually froze stiff, but she could not be convinced to care.

            A taxi drove her to the airport, where her fake identification got her on a plane to Minnesota. She terrified the person who sat next to her, because all the joy of possibility and the best news she’d heard in a century was gushing out at once. Too many teeth showing in her grin, too many words crammed into a minute, and she was vibrating with ecstasy and sickly thin.

            She rented a car and followed verbal directions (never to be written down under any circumstances, call Kosan if there’s any trouble) miles deep into the woods of Cook County, at the northeastern tip of the state. Forty miles from civilization and a quarter-mile hike from where she was forced to abandon the car, Helena found a cabin wired for electricity and internet access. A chill pushed in through the badly sealed windows, but there was wood for the stove and a mattress on the floor. Helena fell asleep laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992), is one of the early feminist texts that examines trauma.


	12. Screwed

            Myka was hauling ass down a dirt road in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm, and she wasn’t convinced this day could get any worse.

            Artie had tried to warn them. “Approach this with caution,” he’d beseeched them. “The only information we have about this artifact is the chaos, absolute chaos, that it leaves in its wake! Stick together, stay sharp, be careful!”

            She hadn’t given it much thought. After all, Myka was always careful, and most of the “chaos” the file described was basic bad luck. Bad luck artifacts, whatever. Myka wasn’t exactly prone to stupid accidents.

            But they’d had a flat tire just trying to drive from South Dakota to Nebraska, she’d ripped her favorite shirt helping Pete put the spare on, and every witness they tried to speak to was suddenly unavailable, for whatever reason. The witness most likely to have actually had eyes on the artifact had slipped and broken his hip in the hospital, and he was in surgery all day.

            Somehow, they’d wrangled a description of their suspect: a Santee boy, about six feet tall, in a cheap windbreaker and muddy shoes. And that evening, while Myka had been demanding why the restaurant they were sitting in was still open when they didn’t have running water at the moment (and god she would have killed for just a glass of water), Pete spotted the kid. He tore out the door, Myka on his heels, crossed the street (carefully, because the vic with the broken hip was in the hospital in the first place because he’d been hit by a car), and twisted his ankle in a pothole.

            “At least we still got the umbrella!” Pete had cheered when the rain started, but actually, that was the umbrella Myka had walloped a suspect with last week, so it was pretty well shot. But it was just a spring rain anyway, Pete had assured her. Famous last words.

            They saw the suspect again, after Pete had taken a couple of advil, on a bicycle. At first, the car didn’t want to start, but they’d finally managed to trail him out of town and into the old, overgrown factory district. It was dark by then, pouring down rain, and they almost had the little weasel when the car hydroplaned. Pete’s side slammed into a tree, and the door wouldn’t open. Myka’s seatbelt bit into her shoulder on impact, but she had been more worried about Pete.

            “I’m fine, I’m okay!” Pete had shouted while he wrestled with his seatbelt. “Just get the kid, Mykes. I’ll catch up to you with the goo can. Go!”

            So Myka had flung herself out of the car and gone running into the woods in the rain.

            She deeply regretted this decision. The kid was three long strides from her, although what she would do when she caught up to a suspect on a bicycle, she wasn’t exactly sure. While she was deciding, her foot caught a root in the road, and she landed on all fours in the mud. The fall wrenched her already injured shoulder.

            “Oh, seriously?” Myka screamed, and a crack of thunder illuminated the bicycle reflectors turning left a few yards ahead. She couldn’t see much else. Her flashlight was smashed.

            _Thank god for spares,_ she thought, leaving the broken flashlight behind and digging out the little one on her keychain.

            Around the left turn was the crumbling hulk of an empty factory. The kid’s bike was dumped in front of the open door. Myka stormed in and found him clambering up one of the rusty catwalks, the kind that shuddered and clanged with every step because not all of the parts were bolted down. Great.

            She followed him up, shouting, “Federal agent! Stop!” as if anyone ever listened. The kid climbed up four stories, then bounded across a bridge to the other side of the building. Myka was gaining on him, but all that did for her was give her a perfect view of the kid ripping out the floor panels of the walkway as he went and throwing them down to the cement floor below.

            Which was clever. The closest intact bridge was about a hundred yards deeper into the building, and by the time Myka got there and headed down, the kid could be down the stairs and out the back door, easy. But then, Myka had the grappler.

            Pete had mocked her for it while they were packing, because who needs it when you have a tesla, but Artie had told them to be careful, and Myka always felt better prepared with the grappler strapped to her back. She’d forgotten to pack clean socks, she realized, but whatever. They’d be home by morning. This kid was hers.

            Myka fired the grappler into the rafters of the factory, gave it a tug, and while the kid looked on wide-eyed from below, she swung across the gap.

            Almost.

            “Aw, come on!” Myka howled when she realized she wasn’t going to make it. She couldn’t even touch the other side with her toes, and her momentum wouldn’t get her safely back to where she was, either. When she shined her little flashlight down to where the kid had been, he was gone.

            The grappler was wet, and her shoulder was screaming in pain now. Oh god.

            All thoughts of the artifact fled, replaced by a constant loop of _Holy crap, I’m gonna die. I’m gonna fall to my death._

            “Pete! Pete, help me!”

            She was tempted to drop her keys so she could get a firmer grip on the grappler, but a better idea came to mind. She aimed the beam out the dusty, cracked windows and covered and uncovered it with her thumb in a signal Pete would recognize right away: SOS.

            It didn’t take him long. Not that any length of time hanging by an injured shoulder over a forty-foot drop was okay to wait through, but thank god he hadn’t been far behind. Myka closed her eyes so she could hear the footsteps pounding up the stairs and know they were getting closer; she didn’t dare wriggle to try and get a view.

            “Pete!”

            He hooked her ankle with the handle of that stupid umbrella, hauled her closer, grabbed her waist, and pulled.

            “Wait, the grappler!” Myka pleaded when it started to slip from her grasp. A little lift gave her enough slack to dislodge the hook and retract it. The force of the hook hitting home made them both stagger backward.

            God, Myka wanted to fall on the catwalk and kiss it, but that would be embarrassing, so she settled for rubbing her neck and taking a deep, calming breath. The calm didn’t last long.

            “Are you alright?”

            That was _not_ Pete.

            Myka swung her flashlight toward the voice, and a sodden, muddy HG Wells squinted in the glare.

            She felt like she’d actually fallen, forty feet onto a concrete floor.

            “Myka, are you hurt?”

            Helena had ducked the light and was looking up at her, and her hands hovered, close but not touching, near Myka’s elbows. Myka shook her head dumbly, because of course she was hurt, what kind of question was that? But she knew that wasn’t what Helena was asking.

            And when Helena stepped away, hands crammed in her pockets, the war started up among all the things Myka wanted to do: choke her, kiss her, scream at her, cry.

            “I’m sorry, I…” Helena started.

            “Oh, you’re sorry?” Myka snapped, because apparently she was going to go with screaming. “For what, exactly? For lying to me? For stealing from the Warehouse, betraying the people who welcomed you into their home? For Claudia, who’s been depressed since Valentine’s Day? Because I bet that one’s your fault, too, isn’t it? For, for letting me think you were dead for months? Months, Helena!”

            Myka was crying now like she had in Denver, in the agonizing days after the surgery, before the lost folio. The days when she was empty like this stupid factory that had a leak in the roof that dripped right on the top of her head.

            “For calling everything I am into question? My emotions, my judgment, my professional integrity, everything! Is that what you’re sorry for?”

            Helena took a breath, lifted her shoulders, and Myka wondered if she was hiding her tears to avoid Myka’s pity or her own humiliation.

            “Fuck you, Helena,” Myka spat, before she ran out of steam. “You’d better be fucking sorry.”

            And then she was slipping into the treacherous territory of letting herself wonder. Where had she been? What was she doing in the middle of the woods in Nebraska? What would have happened if she hadn’t been here? Myka glanced below her and swallowed hard.

            Helena whispered, “What do you need?”

            Myka shoved past her without looking up.

            “Go to hell, Helena. I need to find an artifact.”

            “Right, of course,” Helena said. “Here.”

            She was holding out a nail when Myka turned around.

            “King Richard III’s horseshoe nail,” she explained. “Missing from his majesty’s horse when he rode into the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The horse lost a shoe, and Richard lost his kingdom. Apparently, the nail took issue with being left behind, being deemed so insignificant, and now it refuses to be captured by anyone who seeks it out. The misfortunes it causes range from the mundane to the deadly. Perfectly safe to handle, though you might want to neutralize it for Pete’s sake. ”

            Myka used a glove anyway. The sparks the nail let off were pretty impressive for its size.

            “If you can’t snag it by looking for it,” Myka mused while she sealed the neutralizer bag, “How did you end up with it?”

            Helena smiled, the faintest twitch at the corner of her lips, at Myka’s curiosity. “I saw on the news that there was a great deal of trouble in the area. At Warehouse 12, we kept an eye out for the nail, tried to make sure no one was too gravely injured when it popped up. I had intended to do the same thing here, but the boy who had it ran into me outside.”

            She pointed out the window, and Myka frowned.

            “So once again, you just happen to show up?”

            There was something Helena wasn’t telling her, and Myka’s temper started to rise again. She took a step back from Helena and crossed her arms.

            “The nail is, ultimately, a luck object, and luck is a fickle force at best. It changes hands often. You have observed, I imagine, the way certain artifacts can call to a person.”

            Myka raised an eyebrow.

            “Usually a specific type of person,” she said. “Does the nail have a type?”

            Helena looked, of all things, sheepish. She swept a hand through her dripping hair, shifted on her feet, and sighed, “Uncertain. According to legend, it seeks the touch of the, ah, of the humble. And the just.”

            Now Myka was confused again, and so frustrated she wanted to kick something. Possibly Helena’s ass, but she wasn’t so sure. Helena looked up, not quite at Myka, and grimaced.

            “Your partner will be arriving shortly, and I believe hell is downstairs, so I’ll just…”

            She pointed awkwardly and headed for the stairs. Myka stood on the catwalk, her head back, and groaned. Because she was Myka, and she couldn’t not ask. She felt like Helena was pulling her in half, hurrying away, and apparently she was going to cycle through every emotion she’d ever had before she could let the damn woman go.

            “Helena, wait.”

            The woman stopped halfway down the first set of steps and looked over her shoulder like she expected Myka to punch her. Honestly, she might yet.

            “I want to know,” Myka said. “I want to you to tell me everything. The truth.”

            Helena took a breath and held it a moment before she sighed, like a suspect who’d hoped you wouldn’t ask that particular question, because they weren’t prepared to lie.

            “I can do that,” she said.

            Myka got the feeling it was some kind of sacrifice.

           

 

            Helena slipped away into the rain with instructions to get a room at the hotel where Myka and Pete were staying. Myka was going to check on Pete, take care of the wrecked rental car, and meet her there. The way Myka felt right then, it wouldn’t be hard to convince Pete that she needed personal space for the night. Walking downstairs with Helena, she observed a few things. First, Helena was covered, head to toe, in mud. Second, she was alive, breathing, and Myka was so grateful to know she was breathing that she almost cried. Which led to the third observation: if Helena touched her, she was screwed. But just when she thought she couldn’t possibly hold onto the anger, Myka realized that Helena was in the woods because she needed a place to sleep in her car without getting a ticket, and that was all the annoyance she needed to fuel her fury. Stupid, irresponsible, self-destructive…

            “If you’re not at that hotel, Helena, I swear to god.”

            “There’s nowhere else I could bear to be.”

            Myka laughed, short and breathy. Helena gave her a funny look.

            “What?”

            “Nothing,” Myka said. “I just feel stupid because I seriously believe you.”

            Helena almost said something before Pete’s voice ripped through the woods, and she panicked and rabbited away into the dark. It took Myka a few seconds before she could stop staring and run to Pete.

           

 

            By the time Helena got to the hotel, she was twitching with exhaustion, and the mud on every inch of her had caked. Which, she supposed, was what she got for turning the heat up in the car. Bloody weather.

            She didn’t think about Myka, about what she might do, how she might take what Helena was going to say to her. No use fussing like that, and it was taking all her focus just to count out the cash she needed to pay the boy at the check-in desk.

            _Shower first, worry later,_ she told herself. _Plenty of time for both._            

 

 

            Pete could tell right away that something was off, and when the tow truck finally came, he asked if the guy could drop Myka at the hotel before the whole auto shop/ rental car ordeal. Myka took the offer and stripped her soggy clothes as fast as she could in the hotel. She threw them into the bottom of the shower with her and tried to shuffle some of the mud out of her jeans while the water sunk heat down through her skin to her bones. God, she was freezing.

            And then she started trying to decide what to wear. Because a situation is framed, in many ways, by how you enter it, and Myka wasn’t sure what kind of situation she wanted to be entering. To make matters worse, her only options were slacks or sweatpants, and those were two seriously different messages.

            She wrung her clothes out and flung them over the shower rod to dry. Her hair was, by some miracle, still more or less straight, and she combed it out while she looked through her suitcase.

            Slacks, she decided. Slacks and the t-shirt, because that was casual, comfortable (because she was probably going to be listening to this story for a while), but she could still get up and walk out without a second thought. A split second of hesitation, and Myka pulled her necklace off and crammed it in her pocket. Then she slid into her trench coat and set out for the check-in desk.

            The kid grinned like a doofus when she said her name.

            “What?”

            “You and that British lady, it’s just… It’s so cute.”

            Myka glared and snatched the key card he held out. Cute. Yeah, this whole thing was just fucking adorable.

            Helena’s room was on the second floor and the opposite side of the building from Pete’s. Myka texted him the room number in case something came up, prayed nothing would, and unlocked the door.

            The bathroom was just to the right, and Helena stepped out of it. Myka stepped so far back that she almost ended up in the room’s little closet, and she was being ridiculous, and Helena had noticed that, too. She shifted awkwardly, then waved down at her clothes.

            “I had meant to change once I had all the mud cleaned up. Didn’t expect you here so soon. I’m sorry.”

            Myka shrugged. The sweatpants weren’t that different from the ones she’d considered wearing, and the fact that her top was a little revealing was… distracting, admittedly, but so was her face and hair and voice, so whatever.

            “Should I? Change, I mean,” Helena asked. “It would only take a moment, and I want you to be comfortable.”

            “What did you see in the temple at Delphi?” Myka said, because she didn’t want to wait for a moment.

            Helena looked her straight in the eyes, and Myka realized she hadn’t done that earlier. And suddenly, she was afraid she was in over her head, because Helena’s stare was grim and bottomless.

            “I saw what it would take to finish what I’d started.”

            She took a breath and strode toward the window in the room. Both of her hands were in her hair. Myka followed her, sat down at the little table by the window, and watched Helena flounder.

            “You found my boys, yes? What else do you know?”

            “Well, Leena kept seeing this U symbol, but it stopped two weeks after you left,” Myka told her. She didn’t say that Leena had refused to tell her that directly, that she had overheard Leena telling Artie and given up, convinced herself that Helena was dead. She just shrugged and asked, “Does that mean anything to you?”

            There was a pen and notepad on the table. Helena took it and scribbled a picture.

            “This?” she asked, and when Myka nodded, she continued, “It’s half of the Minoan Trident, the first artifact contained in Warehouse history. The crossbar is ah, is attached to Christina’s coffin, in Paris.”

            Myka watched her carefully while she said that; Helena was watching her fingers run along her drawing and smear the ink. She paused for barely a second, but still, there was a space made for the shame of that. God, it was going to be a long night.

            “The spear is in the stacks of Warehouse 2. I found the crossbar in a field in the English countryside during one of my wanderings, after Christina died. It gleamed, in the way some artifacts do, and I needed a power source for my time machine. I picked it up without a second thought, knowing how dangerous it could be. However, I underestimated how dangerous I could be.”

            “What does it do?” Myka asked.

            Helena was fading in and out, losing the plot of the story she was telling. It spanned more than a century and involved artifacts, so there were probably a hundred different ways to arrange the details. Myka could imagine her drafting, arranging, and editing scenes in her mind, trying to write a novel. Asking questions, Myka figured, would help guide her through what Myka needed from all this.

            Helena worked her jaw for a moment, then looked up at Myka again, but her eyes slid back to the notepad before she could finish saying, “If used properly? It destroys the world.”

            Anyone else, and Myka would have laughed, because that was the definition of hyperbole. But Helena was stone-faced and unshaking, and Myka didn’t need Steve’s superpower to feel the blow of truth. It was an artifact, after all, and in Helena’s hands, it could do anything.

            “The Pythia showed me that, should I move forward with my plans for the trident, you would inevitably follow, and you would accept no death but that which came from my own hands.”

            “You’d have to kill me,” Myka said, because she understood Helena’s antiquated habits of speech, but some things have to be said out loud more than once.

            Helena nodded.

            “And you couldn’t do it.”

            “No, I couldn’t. More than that, I refused. The Pythia gave me a choice, and for once, I made the right one.” Helena sat at the end of the nearest bed. “Still, the trident called, of course. I had been more than happy to be its servant, but when I turned on it, it was loathe to relinquish its slave. I was terrified of what I had nearly done…”

            “And you tried to kill yourself to make sure you never could,” Myka said. She had to remind herself, when Helena nodded, that she was here, she was breathing.

            Helena started to pace, and she massaged her scarred right hand as her story unraveled. A few things stood out to Myka: the quirk of her lips when she said Harper Thorndike’s name, the way her voice caressed Andre Ojara’s, and most of all, the captivating understatement of the thing. The way she talked about breaking the trident’s hold on her, you would think that defeating through emotion an artifact that depends on physical contact (particularly a bifurcated artifact, often the most ruthless kind) was the easiest, most common thing in the world. But most artifacts demanded symmetry. You put the workout underwear on, you take them off. You switch the heads on the griffons to switch bodies back and forth. You kill the evil spine thing, or it kills you. But Helena escaped the Minoan trident, the oldest artifact on record, with sheer willpower (without touching it or neutralizing it, from thousands of miles away) and then went to Waffle House. Like the time traveler who stumbles back home from the future, bloody and filthy, and sits at the table for dinner, or the man who tells his wife over wine that there’s really nothing to worry about, because they’re just Martians, after all.

            Myka felt like she was seeing into Helena like a skeleton watch, every layer of gears set in place and then grinding around in her all at once: time travelling Helena from 1901, relating so easily to a boy from the eighties who got drop-kicked into 2008; Agent Wells, resourceful and relentless, in the chase if it killed her; HG Wells, the author of wonders; a mother, a lonely woman, and everything Myka had believed her to be.

            The story wound down (so did Helena) and ground to a halt. The description of Helena’s work with the Regents was vague, but there was a lot of cloak and dagger with those people, Myka knew that. Going into detail, or even just being here, could get Helena in serious trouble. Myka didn’t push it, and for a moment, neither of them spoke. Then Helena stopped pacing and slumped back onto the end of the bed.

            “You asked for the truth,” she sighed. “For all of it. I don’t expect forgiveness, and I don’t deserve your trust, but if you truly want me to, I’m willing to tell you the last of it.”

            Myka nodded. Helena leaned forward and looked her in the eye, and finally, she didn’t look away.

            “I care about you, Myka. You mean so much to me I don’t know how I can contain it all within myself. Tell me what you need from me, and I’ll give it, even if that means leaving you, the Warehouse, if it means walking out of this room right now. And even then, if you need me, or want me, I’ll be there for you. I swear I’ll never again be difficult for you to find.”

            And that was the end of that. Myka flung herself out of the chair, grabbed Helena’s hands (and she’d been right before; the second she touched Helena, she was screwed) and pulled her into her arms, gasping, “God, I am so glad you’re okay.”

 

 

            Helena let herself cling to Myka, if only to keep herself upright. Every time she sobbed, Myka shushed her, and she was trying to apologize, but Myka only whispered, “I know, I believe you” and rocked her like a child. Finally, Helena buried her face in Myka’s hair and let the woman soothe her while she cried.

            _Shhh, it’s okay, it’s okay. We’re okay. Everything’s gonna be okay._

To be held again, safe and trusted by Myka Bering, had never seemed like a realistic possibility. Helena cried until her legs wouldn’t hold her, then sniffed and tried to make her collapse look voluntary. Myka knelt down in front of her while she hid her face and dried her eyes.

            “Hey you,” she crooned when Helena looked up again.

            Pushing her luck, Helena reached out and ran a lock of Myka’s hair between her fingers, inquiring, “So when did this happen? It’s so straight.”

            Myka shrugged. “I like it straight sometimes.”

            “It’s lovely.”

            Dear Christ, her nose was running. Her face was hot and her eyes felt like they were dissolving, and something had to be done about all that. She garbled something about freshening up and shuffled into the bathroom.

            “So tell me about you,” she called once her nose was clear and there was a cool, damp cloth against her face. Claudia had, of course, given her the broad strokes of things, but there was a unique lilt to the way Myka remembered and retold things that had been sorely missing from Claudia’s updates.

            Myka talked while Helena washed her face and brushed her teeth, the dearest, homiest Warehouse tales Helena thought she’d ever heard. It was so conversational now, too, relaxed and friendly, the way they had used to be together. Helena forced down the rumblings that she didn’t deserve it, ignored the fact that Myka was avoiding the darker parts of the past, and sat watching how happy Myka looked while she talked.

            “Do you need the washroom?” Helena asked once they’d sat in silence for a few moments, mostly to stop herself from nodding off.

            “I brushed my teeth before I came,” Myka said. “I was all wet and gross, and I like to clean up completely after I get like that.”

            Helena sighed at the precious detail, and the damn thing transformed into a yawn before she could stop it.

            “Time for bed?” Myka asked.

            “No,” Helena said. “I want to stay here with you.”

            In truth, Helena had been awake since seven in the morning the day before. She’d pulled over at the factory to take a nap because she simply couldn’t see to drive any longer. The bolt of adrenaline that came with finding Myka was all she’d been running on for the past three hours.

            Myka gave her an indulgent smile, and Helena would have been indignant if it were anyone else and she were any less exhausted.

            “I’m not going anywhere, Helena. There’s two beds. I can stay.”

            Helena stared at the bed across from her, smiled dumbly, and when Myka laughed at her, she admitted defeat.

 

 

            Once, while Helena had been at the Warehouse, she’d gone on a three-day gadget bender, taking apart three old computers and a broken stereo she’d found in a dumpster and trying to build her own little Turing machine. She’d read the complete works of Alan Turing, half a dozen online tutorials, and god knows what else, and she just sat in her workshop in the Warehouse reading and fidgeting and occasionally electrocuting herself. Myka was the only thing she’d take a break for, so Myka had always brought her food and water. There was no hope of convincing her to sleep. Knowing what she knew now, Myka realized Helena had probably been depressed out of her mind and trying to fight it. When the Turing Machine worked, she’d brought it to Myka’s room at Leena’s and presented it to her with the same goofy grin she had on her face now.

            The woman was utterly wiped.

            Myka’s mind was buzzing with questions, ranging from, “The Regents hired you to do what, exactly?” to “What did you do for Christmas?” and a couple odds and ends in between, but she laid them to rest and coaxed Helena under the sheets of one of the beds. Her hand was on Helena’s bare arm, and all she could think once she touched her was, _Yep, screwed_ , over and over.

            Helena settled with a groan of relief, and Myka turned to the empty bed. The presence of Helena behind her made her back tingle, and this so was not the time for tingly feelings, but Myka’s rock solid resolve was apparently in the other hotel room.

            _So screw it,_ she thought, and she turned around.

            “Do you want to… share?” Myka asked.

            Helena blinked up at her from the pillows, and Myka didn’t want to make a thing about this or keep her awake, so she tried to explain her reasoning without making it sound like a secretly sexy sleepover type of thing, because neither of them needed that.

            “I mean, you don’t want me to leave, and I missed you and I can’t believe you’re here and I thought maybe it might make us both happy if…”

            Nope. This was stupid.

            “You know what? Never mind.”

            Myka was reaching for the other bed, hoping there was a black hole under the covers that would swallow her, when Helena called her name.

            She was so bleary she might not even know what she was saying anymore, but she managed to look shy when she slurred, “Could I hold your hand?”

            And that was it. Myka was officially hopeless. She climbed into the space Helena made in the bed, slipped her slacks off under the covers, and arranged herself so they could be comfortable and not touching (because again, awkward knee touching and crap like that was off the table tonight, like surgery and Regent work and all the things that had to be thought about eventually). Helena laced drowsy fingers with hers and cradled their joined hands a little closer to her than Myka would have dared. Poor thing was asleep before Myka could even turn out the light.

            Myka had almost nodded off herself when her eyes snapped open in panic. She’d forgotten how cuddly she could get in her sleep.

 


	13. The Last of Our Secret Liaisons

            Helena settled on the unused bed the next morning while Myka went to the hotel lobby to fetch breakfast. They’d agreed that it was probably best for her to stay in the room until Pete and Myka left, just in case, because Myka didn’t really know about Helena’s undercover work, but she could smell trouble, and Helena reeked of it. Still, she courted it, too; against Myka’s advice, she’d opened the curtains to let the sunlight in.

            In the quiet moments she had, she began deciding how much Myka should know about her work with the Regents, what Myka would tolerate not knowing, and how to separate her need for an ally from her desperate craving for company. Dear god, she did need fresh eyes on this puzzle.

            “Hope you like yogurt and frozen waffles, because that’s all they have downstairs,” Myka called as she bustled into the room.

            She grinned while she dumped two plates, plastic utensils, and a heap of butter and syrup packets on the bed. Helena pulled what she needed toward her and smiled back.

            “I found myself once in a dump that served only little frosted cakes in plastic wrap,” she said. “This is a great improvement, I assure you. Delicious, actually.”

            That the previously frozen slab of white bread she was chewing shouldn’t be delicious didn’t negate the elegant toasted crunch, the smoothness of the melted butter and its contrast with the sharp bite of syrup. It steamed when she ripped a piece off.

            Some days, her mind was like dawn in London, blanketed in mist, and that was normal; one could navigate it easily because one knew the way, even though all around was blunted and gray. When the morning burned through the haze so quickly, though, one had to slow one’s step and marvel. London in full daylight, her mind at full power, were beautiful things.

            Helena watched the steam from her breakfast curl into the air, stared a moment at the vividness of the sunlight on the colorful bedspread and Myka’s eyes, then hummed in pleasure and laughed.

            Myka watched her devour half a waffle, bemused and frowning. “What’s funny?”

            “I’m not depressed!” Helena crowed. “God, I love this feeling.”

            She decimated the waffle and plunged into a yogurt cup. She’d missed the pleasure that could be taken from food, and her body had clearly missed the nutrients. Her appetite, though, made her sheepish. She winced and explained, “Forgive me, darling, but I’m going to eat about three times this.”

            “No problem, I’ll get you some more,” Myka said, and she started to stand.

            Helena couldn’t bear to have her leave.

            “No, wait,” she said, her fingertips on Myka’s knee to stay her. “Help me with this puzzle first.”

            There wasn’t much information to share; the Regents had kept so quiet about the details that almost everything Helena knew, she’d pieced together herself. Myka listened with such intensity, though. It was delightful.

            “What I can’t sort out,” Helena finished, “is where this blighter started. If the murder conspiracy is real, and there’s good reason to think it is, our man must have had an in of some sort. Personally, I began with Benedict Valda, and I’ve found two others so far, over the course of seven weeks. If this predator were hunting the Warehouse, he’d come for the agents, not the Regents; the agents are the visible actors, after all. Who even knows about the Regents?”

            Myka said, “The agents do. Maybe he started with an agent and moved from there.”

            Helena knew where she was going with that. She shook her head.

            “McPherson was declared dead and utterly untraceable for fifteen years. This murderer is an excellent hunter, but no one could find James. It’s not an old partner, either. He killed them all except his bodyguard, who’s in prison and has had no visitors. Nor has anyone approached me.”

            “What about his wife?” Myka asked. “If you can’t find McPherson, you can still find Carol.”

            For a long moment, Helena just stared.

            “He didn’t tell you about her, did he?”

            “No,” Helena said, slowly, because it stung. “I suppose he didn’t trust me with what he loved. Clever man.”

            She turned from James in the past to Carol in the present, slotted her into place in this mystery. A man with a grudge goes looking for James, finds Carol, whose husband was sorely used, and she gives the man a name. It would only take one.

            “Yes. Yes, this is it!”

            Myka grinned at Helena’s excitement and listened to her babble about how from Carol the Regents could discover the first name, and from there draw connections to each of the victims and begin creating a more effective means of supposing which of the Regents might be next. Of course, one would need a motive to establish a more refined guess, but…

            “Don’t you think the Regents have already gotten this far?” Myka interrupted.

            Helena snorted. “The Regents are largely still trying to pretend that nothing’s the matter. My work is a precaution in their eyes, a seizing of a unique opportunity. I don’t really trust them to even do what I advise them to, which is why I’m treading beyond my specific territory. It’s also why I’m grateful to have run into you. I could use your help.”

 

 

            “I have a few other things I’d like you to look into,” Helena said, and Myka was all ears.

            She could tell that Helena was desperately lonely, and she worried about it. Didn’t exactly seem healthy to have someone so recently recovered, who’d been traumatized through isolation, doing a job that depended on isolation for success. Helena seemed fine, mostly, but still.

            It was sheer ecstasy being able to help. There wasn’t much she could do about Helena being alone, but maybe having Myka back her up, even all the way in Univille, would comfort her.

            Helena explained, “I’d do it myself, had I the resources, but alas. One of the Regents I found had fallen victim about a year ago, and I wanted to know why. I found a tremendous amount of research in his basement about a chunk of the old British House of Commons, which he had suspected was an artifact. He was in the middle of exploring its properties when he was killed. Tungsten poisoning, I believe it was. Kosan says they’re having a historian look into the artifact, but I want more than that. I want to know what it does, and more importantly, how to stop it, because in the hands of this murderer…”

            “Sounds like bad news,” Myka said. “What do you know about it?”

            “Not much, and most of it seemed to be from either history books or Warehouse records.”

            Myka nodded. “I’ll dig around and see what I can find. How can I get this info to you?”

            Helena said she’d come to her if the information was needed.

            “My primary concerns are having all the information possible about this situation and making sure that the three of us, myself, the Regents, and the Warehouse, have some form of communication established. That way, if something happens to Kosan, I can come to you, and the Regents have you to turn to if…”

            At that point, Helena must have realized that she was breezing right past the fact that she might die. Myka had already guessed as much. She didn’t make Helena admit it out loud.

            “God, I hope they’re paying you well,” was what she said instead.

            Helena laughed, sharp and loud, and Myka flinched.

            Mutual mistrust, no money, and a job only Helena could do. Why the hell would she agree to…

            “Did they threaten you?” Myka demanded.

            “Of course not!” Helena exclaimed. She looked confused and scandalized. “They simply offered a trade: my work for my old job. Once this is over, I can come back to the Warehouse.”

            “But if they didn’t think you’d be a good agent, they wouldn’t let you do this! And what kind of trade is that, anyway? Work for us, and we’ll let you work for us more?”

            “With pay,” Helena said.

            She was so casual about it. Like nothing was wrong, like people had any right to treat her like this. Myka erupted.

            “Don’t you get how fucked up that is? Helena, they’re taking advantage of you!”

            “And I’m taking advantage of the only opportunity I have!” Helena yelled back.

            Both of them took a breath. Helena rubbed her face and started picking at Myka’s abandoned toaster waffle. Myka kicked herself, because of course Helena knew what the Regents were doing to her. She hadn’t been dismissive because it didn’t matter; she’d been avoiding this conversation because it hurt. Because she _had_ to let them do this to her, had to earn being treated like a person again.

            “That was less helping out and more salting the wound, wasn’t it?” Myka finally said.

            Helena winced. “A bit, yes.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “Don’t be absurd,” Helena scoffed. “No call to apologize to me.”

            “Of course there is. Helena, I hurt you.”

            “No more than I deserve, I assure…”

            “Okay, I’m gonna nip this one in the bud, because that’s ridiculous,” Myka cut in. “The fact that you’ve done things that aren’t okay doesn’t mean it’s okay for people to do crap to you. Especially not people who care about you. Okay?”

            Helena made that face again, like she couldn’t decide whether or not to cry. She smiled instead.

            “Why is it you’re so fixated on that word, ‘okay’? You’ve said it two dozen times by now.”

            “Excuse me for not having the vocabulary of a Victorian literary genius,” Myka sniped.

            When Helena chuckled, all tension diffused. Myka let herself relax again and fall into their old pattern of near-intimacy.           

            “I’m serious. You need anything out there, you call me, because I am right here for you. I’ll look into the British Parliament artifact, and I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. Anything comes up, I’ll find a way to let you know.”

            Helena’s hand fidgeted with the bedspread near Myka’s fingers.

            “Thank you,” she whispered. “I can’t tell you how much good it does me just to have someone to talk to again. I’ve missed you wildly.”

            Myka let her fingertips brush Helena’s.

            “You must be lonely.”

            “I’ll admit to occasionally calling Mrs. Frederick, to inquire whether she remembers soap savers or the advent of the zipper. Dear woman always lets me talk, even though I can practically hear her scowling through the phone.”

            Helena leaned a little forward when she laughed, and they were practically holding hands again, and Myka had completely forgotten that this was new, that they had more to talk about than they ever could before Pete came looking for her, and if Pete hadn’t called in that exact instant, Myka might have kissed her.

            Instead, Myka dove for her phone and told Pete she’d be down in five.

            _Did I even pack self-control?_ she wondered while Pete filled her in on the car situation (his insurance was giving them a rental, a tow truck would drive his car back to Univille on Thursday). Because she knew, when she thought about it, that what Helena needed was back-up, not sexual tension. Not that their relationship had ever _not_ had that, but seriously, she needed to get it together.

            Within the two minutes she was on the phone, Helena had cleaned up their breakfast and busied herself with her socks and boots.

            “Headed out then, are we?” she asked when Myka hung up.

            “Probably should be.”

            Myka watched Helena zip her boots on, the way her hair spilled forward while she looked down, the sharp edges of her against the sloppy, faded colors of the hotel room. It was agony to think of leaving, of letting Helena wander back out into the hunting grounds of a murderer alone. She started jamming the ring down over her knuckles without even thinking. Helena saw when she looked up, and the smile on her face was stunningly affectionate.

            “Claudia told me you wore it.”

            “Pretty much always,” Myka told her.

            Helena nodded toward the window, the outdoors. “Should let you get a head start, I imagine.”

            Myka nodded, checked her pockets to be sure she was leaving with everything she’d come in with. It was Helena’s turn to stare, apparently. When Myka looked up at her again, she didn’t even try to hide her gaze.

            If Myka touched her, she’d never let her go.

            “Be careful.”

            Helena nodded. “You, too, darling. Thank you.”

            She stepped aside to let Myka pass, and Myka forced herself out the door.

 

 

            Down the stairs and halfway to Pete’s room, it washed over her again: Helena was alive. She was coming home.

            “You’re in a good mood,” Pete grumbled. Pete had eaten every waffle in the joint (poor Helena), and Myka could hear his stomach still growling. “Figured your panties would be knotted up until we snagged the artifact.”

            Myka tossed him the neutralized nail and some line about luck being a lady. Pete sang “Guys and Dolls” all the way back, every part in every song, over and over, which was annoying. Myka couldn’t have cared less.

           

 

            It was the middle of May, springtime, but Atlanta was hot when Helena arrived. She’d been firmly instructed to stay out of her old neighborhoods, to travel directly to 528 Donald Street, advise on the location’s suitability as a meeting place, and leave.

            Try as she might to look inconspicuous, Helena couldn’t help staring up to where the building disappeared into the atmosphere. She almost whistled, the way she’d heard Pete do once. Architecture in the twenty-first century was truly remarkable.

            “Emily!”

            The Regents’ stenographer hopped over the curb, in that odd youthful way some delighted older women could muster. Her face was always serious, but there was a decided friendliness in the lines, and Helena nodded kindly to her.

            “I was told I’d be meeting the head of security,” Helena said. “Are you she?”

            “Mister Jackson will be with us shortly,” the stenographer laughed.

            Helena had to admit she was disappointed. To have this restaurant-smelling woman at the helm of an international security network would be a delicious sign that times had changed, truly. She gestured toward the door, and the stenographer led the way inside.

            “I take it you haven’t found me yet, or you’d know I’m not Jackson,” the stenographer said.

            “I haven’t a great deal to work with, as far as you go. What I have discovered is that the scent clinging to your hair and clothes is canola oil, used frequently in diners, so you must be a chef or a waitress of some kind, likely in a more affordable American establishment.”

            The stenographer gave her a crooked smile. “Show up and I’ll feed you.”

            Helena was about to respond that if she ‘showed up,’ Kosan would feed her to the wolves, but a blond man strode into the lobby, pointedly ignored her, and asked the Regent stenographer if she was ready to begin.

            “We’ll have two men posted here,” Mr. Jackson stated when the Regent pulled out a notepad and nodded. “There is one entrance to your left, behind the desk, and one back entrance in the basement below us. Both are armored, both will be secured. Only way in and out will be that front entrance, and no way to get through without passing my men.”

            “You mean they’ll be locked from the outside?” Helena asked.

            Mr. Jackson frowned. “In and out, Lake. Almost no chance of anyone getting in, but if they do, we sure as hell don’t want them getting out.”

            “And if the building is compromised? How will the Regents get out?”

            “Front entrance. If that entrance is also compromised, I have a key that will unlock the side and back basement exits. Now if we’re done with those questions, I’ll show you the suite.”

            Mr. Jackson forced Helena to step aside to reach the elevator. Helena clasped her locket before she stepped inside. Claustrophobia was understandable considering her history, but she didn’t peg Mr. Jackson as the understanding type. She consoled herself with quizzing him about the safety features of the elevator: Can the doors be opened manually? Have the emergency stop and fire department call buttons been tested? Is there an escape hatch in the ceiling of the car?

            And then, in alarm, “The fortieth floor?”

            “Gives my men downstairs plenty of time to report if they suspect there’s trouble downstairs.”

            “It would also take a great deal of time for the Regents to get down,” Helena insisted.

            Jackson took a deep, rumbling breath. “In the case of an evacuation, I will lead the Regents into the elevator and stand front and center while the Regents line the sides, here. Anyone waiting in front of the car will see my gun first thing.”

            “You mean your tesla.”

            “No, Lake, I mean my gun.”

            Helena rolled her eyes and muttered, “Of course, because American cowboy heroism is much more important than taking prisoners and extracting information. Not to mention human life.”

            She shoved past him out of the elevator when at last the doors glided open.

            “My understanding of your position here, Miss Lake,” he said, as calm as a man who was turning red could be, “is that you are to advise on the plans for each possible location as they are laid out, not to criticize and question every damn decision that’s been made. Now, I will be posted here. This position is ideal because…”

            For a while, Helena tried to keep her peace and simply examine the suite. The Regent took notes, watched Helena study every surface with eyes and hands, and asked Mr. Jackson about fire safety strategies and emergency response time in the area. She seemed satisfied with his answers. Helena found nothing in the room that could be used as a weapon, no reason to suspect the windows would withstand blunt force.

            “Is there anything else you need to know, ma’am?” Mr. Jackson asked the Regent.

            “Yes,” Helena replied. “I need to know that you will under no circumstances bring a party of Regents to this location in the near future. There are simply too many possibilities that haven’t been taken into account, and too few options for…”

            “It’s a two-hour reconnaissance meeting, not the damn Western Front,” Jackson cut in.

            “You have other options, do you not? Surely better options than this. I was asked to advise, and…”

            “And all you’ve done is criticize and complain. You act like you’re the only one in this building who knows what they’re doing, but you aren’t even trained for this. I hear your concern, but you don’t get the final say, and you sure as hell don’t tell me what to do.”

            Helena rolled her eyes. Just like a man, to assume any opinion was a challenge to his authority, waving his credentials around as if his life depended on it. Can’t hear a word that isn’t a chorus of agreement. Neanderthal.

            “This isn’t a cock fight, Mr. Jackson,” Helena sighed, and she’d meant to say something conciliatory, truly she had. It was just all a bit tense. “I’m simply fulfilling my duty as a trusted advisor to…”

            “Trusted?” Jackson spat. “You think you’re trusted? I know exactly who you are, lady, and I know _what_ you are. Come in here acting like you’re the right hand man, but you’re nothing but a rabid dog on a chain!”

            “Mr. Jackson,” the Regent pleaded, but he turned away from them both, muttering, “They should have put you down.”

            Helena looked to the Regent, saying, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take the stairs down. I’d like to have a look at them, and perhaps inform Mr. Kosan that his head of security is a _fucking baboon_!”

            This last she yelled down the hall to the elevator. Mr. Jackson’s ears turned red, and he clenched his hands by his sides. Admirable, Helena thought as she stormed toward the stairwell, how quickly he’d mastered his temper.

            Somewhere around the thirtieth floor, her own anger ebbed. Fear and fury often mingled, and Mr. Jackson, she knew, had a great deal to be afraid of. Each Regent lost was a death he was personally responsible for, dedicated man that he must be. To have someone question his ability to do his job while he himself was doing the same must be a terrible blow, especially when it came from her, a woman who had also evaded his grasp. Helena had no idea what he was working with, and the poor man had no idea what he was up against.

            Not that it excused his lack of professional grace or forward thinking. That rot could get someone killed.

            Helena resolved to submit a report to Kosan, and with any luck, he’d heed her. It was he who’d asked her to attend this inspection, after all. And she was his employee, not his dog.

            “… gonna write a full report about that woman’s attitude,” Jackson was saying when Helena reached the lobby.

            “You do that,” the Regent warned, “and I’ll submit my notes about who started it.”

            Mr. Jackson led them out of the building and waited to escort the Regent to her car.

            “Take care, Emily,” the Regent told her before she walked away.

 

 

            It only took Helena two more days to find her: Theodora Stanton, owner of Ted’s Restaurant in Deadwood, South Dakota. Helena drove through the night and strode into the establishment, Kosan be damned, only half an hour after it opened.

            “Party of one?” an over-worked girl named Journey called to her.

            “I’m looking for Ted, actually.”

            Journey grabbed a dingy menu and led Helena to a booth, laughing, “That figures, on the one day in history that she’s late. I’m the one running everything this morning, so service might be a little on the slow side, but you just let me know what you need and I’ll get it around to you. Do you want a drink to start with?”

            Helena ordered coffee, because she was a little dozy, and took her time admiring her surroundings. Journey was laying out the breakfast special when Helena inquired as to how late Ted might be.

            “I just called her and got nothing, so she must be on her way. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”

            Two scrambled eggs, a homemade biscuit dipped in gravy, and twelve minutes later, Helena called Journey over again. Poor thing was sweat-soaked and huffing from the morning rush, but she grinned at Helena all the same.

            “Why exactly did Ted say she was going to be late?” Helena asked her.

            The smile faltered. “She didn’t.”

            “Get me her address.”

            “I’m not sure I can do…” Journey began, but Helena shouted, “Now!”

            The girl scampered off, telling a couple who’d walked in the door to seat themselves. Helena threw cash on the table while she waited and crammed the other biscuit in her jacket pocket.

            “Change is yours,” she told Journey when she returned, and she snatched the post-it the girl held out and stormed off.

            It took her five hours to find the ashes, in an abandoned office building twenty miles from Theodora’s home. She called Mrs. Frederick, who sent security to collect the remains. She called Kosan, but his phone was off. She called, over and over, until the next morning, when he told her he’d been on a plane. The news had already reached him, and the meeting he was headed toward was even more important now.

            “There is a real and present threat, Miss Lake. We need you on stand-by in Atlanta.”

            “Don’t go up to that bloody fortieth floor,” Helena warned him.

            He didn’t listen.

 

 

            Myka wore patterns when she was upset. They were loud and sloppy and they helped her let go. She chose a particularly terrible button-up shirt, yellow-green with purple flowers, and she could deal again with the fact that Sam was dead, at least enough to function.

            Sam had been killed by an artifact. An artifact and a sworn Secret Service agent that both of them had trusted. Myka had caught him, snagged and bagged the artifact, but it didn’t make her feel better.

            Her mother, her therapist, Dickson, they’d all told her that grief was a cycle. Some days would be worse than others, but the peaks would get lower every time they hit, fade faster. Little things would set her off, come out of nowhere no matter how vigilant she was. It would always hurt, even when she got to the point when there were years in between.

            That didn’t make her feel better, either.

            But Artie wanted all hands on deck at the Warehouse, so she had to function. She and Pete needed to shelve the barometer, and there would be another disaster waiting for them right after. Hopefully a less personal one. So Myka buttoned up her floral blouse, gave herself ten minutes to have a fit, and went back to work.

            Steve looked tense when she and Pete walked into the office, and Claudia didn’t smile at them.

            A Regent had died. Murder, no question anymore, and Myka would have gone through yesterday all over again, the whole damn horror show of Sam and Leo and Denver Secret Service, to give Helena just that one name: Sally Stukowski.

           

 

            Helena got the name from Mrs. Frederick. She found Stukowski’s body before it was cold.

            “We’re putting you on protective detail,” Mrs. Frederick informed her when she called it in. “Leave your car at the airport, we’ll deliver it to you. Arrangements have been made for you to arrive at Leena’s at seven o’clock. Regent Lattimer will meet you there. Her safety is of the utmost importance.”

            “Wait, Lattimer?” Helena asked, but the line was already dead.

 

 

            “Well that was a crappy day at the office.”

            Steve jumped, but Claudia didn’t seem to notice. She flopped down next to him, grinned, and Steve smiled back helplessly, or tried to. He was still trying to put what had happened to him into words.

            “What’s going on? You look like you put down Old Yeller yourself or something.”

            This was over. It was the first thing that really hit him. Being with Claudia every day, going on adventures Laverne-and-Shirley style, was over.

            “You know, Claud, there is no one that I would rather chase artifacts with than you.”

            He couldn’t quite look at her while he said it.

            Claudia stopped grinning and asked, “Why am I sensing an ugly subtext here?”

            “I was…” What? Right. He was right. “Insubordinate today.”

            “Oh please,” Claudia laughed. “Welcome to my world.”

            “No, I’m serious!” Steve snapped.

            They finally looked at each other, and he tried to tell her.

            “It’s complicated. I…”

            _I was right._

            But he couldn’t tell Claudia that. Ugly subtext didn’t begin to cover what he had watched Mrs. Frederick do, torturing Sally Stukowski until she wept for her life, even when she had nothing to tell them. The Warehouse was Claudia’s home. It wasn’t her fault that the Regents were willing to go this far. Artie, Pete, Myka… She could trust them. She needed them. Especially now that he couldn’t be there. He couldn’t tell Claudia. So he didn’t.

            “I drew my gun on Mrs. Frederick. And she fired me.”

            Claudia didn’t accept that. Misunderstanding, she said. She’d talk to Mrs. Frederick.

            “No, don’t do that,” Steve insisted. She’d find out what had happened, and she’d destroy his one shot to make it right.

            Mrs. Frederick had told him that no one could know where she was sending him, that she was sending him anywhere at all. He had until midnight to decide if he wanted to come back, if his love of the Warehouse was stronger than his hatred for what he had watched her do.

            A few days later, when he’d decided, when he was on the job, he started to regret it. Not being able to answer any of Claudia’s five daily calls was agonizing. He listened to every single voicemail, though, and tried to remember that he was doing this for her.

 

 

            “So I told Steve’s voicemail ‘hi’ for you. Again,” Claudia said while Myka shelved the binoculars from the Enola Gay. “Solid evidence for me having the magical ability to make people disappear.”

            Myka sighed. She and Claudia had made a great team today, catching a stalker and helping a sweet young girl save herself, but clearly no one would top Steve as a partner.

            “He’s been through a lot,” Myka said, because she didn’t know that for a fact, but she couldn’t imagine Steve defying Mrs. Frederick on a whim. “Maybe he just needs some time.”

            Claudia shrugged. There wasn’t much Myka could do to help, as usual; Steve was less likely to answer her calls than Claudia’s, and she couldn’t give her the consolation that at least Helena was okay, because no one was supposed to know that. And, frankly, ‘wandering the country looking for Regents at the same time as a serial killer’ didn’t really pass as okay.

            “It just sucks, you know? We’ve got an official bad guy to chase down, and my wingman isn’t here to help. Steve would love this! It’s action hero work.”

            “Really? Sitting in Artie’s office hacking through mountains of paper trail is hero work?”

            Claudia rolled her eyes. They made their way back to Artie’s office, and Claudia settled in and set to work. Myka grabbed her jacket.

            “Hey, you’re not helping?” Pete whined when he saw her headed for the door.

            “For once in my life, I’m not up to doing overtime. I’m gonna go back to Leena’s and do some paperwork. Call me if you find something.”

            In truth, Myka wanted to plug the new information about Walter Sykes into what she already had about that chunk of the British House of Commons Helena was worried about. Normally, she did that work in the Warehouse, after hours when everyone was gone, but since everyone was currently here, there was no reason she couldn’t investigate from the comfort of her own room.

            Her own room that, when she arrived, was locked. Weird.

            Myka drew her keys and her gun at the same time and rushed into the room barrel first. Helena almost fell from the window she was climbing out of.

            “Gunpoint again, darling?” she whispered as she clambered back over the windowsill.

            “What are you doing here?” Myka hissed back, and regretted it immediately.

            Helena fidgeted with her fingers and started turning back to the window, babbling, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have intruded, I’ll just…”

            “That’s not what I meant.” Myka shut the door and dropped her gun on the dresser, then turned back to Helena, hands in her pockets. “Is everything okay?”

            “I’m fine,” Helena assured her, and Myka wondered if she was that transparent or if Helena just knew her that well. “I’m on assignment, watching over Regent Lattimer, but seeing as she was in the Warehouse, surrounded by agents, I thought I might get some rest.”

            Upon inspection, Myka’s bed wasn’t the way she’d left it. For one thing, her teddy bear from the couch was propped up on the pillows.

            “Did you sleep with my bear?”

            Helena opened her mouth and clutched at her hair. Myka laughed.

            “That’s adorable.”

            She flopped down on the edge of her bed and started pulling her shoes and socks off. Helena leaned easily against the windowsill, watching. Myka couldn’t tell if this was going to be a comforting, friendly conversation or a business call, and since Helena didn’t say anything, she figured it was up to her to decide. She was going to say something about Sykes, but when she looked up, all she saw was the purpling bruise on Helena’s jaw.

            “What the hell happened?”

            Helena tried to hide the injury (had been the whole time, Myka realized, by keeping that side of herself out of Myka’s line of sight), but she told the truth.

            “I was sparring with Regent Lattimer. She has an exceptional right hook.”

            “Jane punched you in the face?” Myka exclaimed.

            “I provoked her,” Helena said, hands up to calm her. “I wanted to see what she was made of, and I was not disappointed. Makes me feel better about her leaving my care.”

            “Well good, but she still punched you in the face,” Myka muttered, beckoning Helena closer so she could have a better look. “So you won’t be watching her anymore?”

            Helena winced, hopefully not because Myka had accidentally prodded a tender spot on her jaw. “Regent Lattimer doesn’t much care for me. Disappointing, as I quite like her. She’s stubborn and determined to return home, to her routine and her preferred protectors. She’ll leave in the morning, and I’ll look into a man named Archer, who fell out of contact about an hour ago. The Regents would like me to investigate his disappearance without drawing attention to the fact that we know about it, in the hopes that our murderer won’t switch strategies again.”

            “Walter Sykes,” Myka told her. “Jane remembered the name, the gang’s at the Warehouse looking into him now.”

            “And why are you here?” Helena asked, pulling away from Myka’s examination and settling beside her on the bed.

            “I’m looking into that House of Commons artifact. Definitely is an artifact, gives off pulses, so it’s probably powerful, but from what I can tell, that power seems pretty unfocused.”

            Helena nodded. “Any idea whether neutralizer alone would stop it?”

            “Well, that’s plan A, but I’m not counting on it. Plans B, C, and D are in the works.”

            “Excellent.”

            The way she sat, a little folded in on herself, her hands twitching useless in her lap, Myka could tell that Helena had something on her mind. She didn’t say anything, though, so Myka just took her in: hair just a little out of place, the closest to bed head she would ever get, and filthy; shirt cross-buttoned, one boot only half-zipped. Myka must have surprised her when she got back, and she’d been leaving in a rush. Her shoulders were tight, and her breathing was uneven, as if she had to remind herself every so often to actually do it. Anxiety, probably. Briefly, Myka wondered if it were possible to make a sandwich and get it up here to her, if Helena would have the time to wait, or if she would just slip away while Myka was gone. God, it was a helpless feeling.

            And then Helena broke down and confessed.

            “I found Theodora Stanton.”

            Not found like she’d found the others, Myka knew. Found what was left.

            “She was, ah. She was an ally of mine.”

            Her body shook, and she dropped her head onto Myka’s shoulder, and Myka held her without question.

            “There’s no way I could have gotten there faster,” Helena said, as if convincing Myka would help her convince herself. “Nothing I could have done. She wouldn’t blame me.”

            Myka wasn’t sure telling her it wasn’t her fault would help, but she did it anyway. Then she listened closely for any sign of life in the house, kept Helena safe while she cried. It didn’t take her as long this time to stop.

            “This week sucks, huh?” Myka asked while Helena blew her nose on a handkerchief.

            Helena chuckled. “You, too, then?”

            “What happened in Denver is a story for another day. But did you hear about the fortieth floor?”

            “Christ, I warned them about that!”

            “Clusterfuck from start to finish. You’re right about Jane, though. Never freaked out once the whole time we were up there, and she had this brilliant…”

            Helena was ashen, staring at her.

            “ _You_ were _in_ that building?” she whispered, but it was like the first rumblings of a volcanic eruption.

            It occurred to Myka that there was probably a reason the Regents hadn’t told Helena that part.

            “I’m fine,” she said, but Helena had already lost it. She flung herself up from the bed, pacing and ranting.

            “Fine? Myka, you could have died! You nearly did, because the Regents refuse to take the time to consider…”

            “Hey, I was in there because I was doing my job. And if you can’t deal with that, if you can’t trust my judgment about it, we have a problem here.”

            Helena stopped dead.

            “Myka, it’s not a matter of trust. You never should have been in that situation, nor should Kosan or Lattimer or anyone else!”

            The trouble was, Myka knew where this sort of thinking could lead. She’d watched agents do battle with all sorts of loved ones, people so afraid of the work that had to be done that they sucked all joy out of the job and made good agents second-guess themselves at exactly the wrong moment. And for an agent to go into the field with the safety of someone else as their priority was a good way for that agent to get killed. Myka wasn’t ready to name what Helena was to her, what she was to Helena, but Helena was definitely the throw-herself-on-the-sword type. For Helena to worry about her, and to make Myka have to second-guess Helena and herself, was to jeopardize whatever this was between them.

            “Things happen, Helena, and I need you to trust me when they do. If you can’t do that…”

            “I’m afraid.”

            Helena was staring at the carpet. Myka reached out and held her hands, tugged on them until Helena looked at her.

            “And how do you think I feel every time you leave? But you’re a good agent, Helena. You love it, you’re good at it, and it’s who you are. I like you this way, Agent Wells, and I trust you.”

            Helena shook her head.

            “Warehouse agents and Regents are partners. The Regents should have had your back, and they failed. It’s them I mistrust, not you.”

            Myka groaned.

            “The Regents are idiots, I’m on board with that. But I’m fine, Helena. I’m right here. It’s not that big a deal.”

            “Fine,” Helena conceded, rolling her eyes. “If you can be blasé about it, so can I.”

            Myka grinned and swung their hands. “I love a woman who speaks French.”

            Crap. Helena gave her a look that was half amusement and half questioning, and Myka wasn’t ready to say she wasn’t kidding. They were about to say goodbye; it wasn’t the right time. She dropped their hands and pulled her legs up onto the bed, the most casual means of putting distance between them that she could come up with.

            “So, Walter Sykes, Regent Archer. Anything else new we should share?”

            “Nothing I can think of,” Helena said, “and it’s getting late, anyway. I should get back to my post.”

            “Right.”

            Myka stood up, which put her close to Helena again, and pretended she wasn’t sending mixed messages and making literally everything harder on herself.

            “This should probably be the last of our secret liaisons,” Helena said, and Myka wondered if she threw the French in on purpose. “With any luck, this will be over soon, and there won’t need to be any more secrets at all.”

            Sure, except for this one really awkward secret that probably wasn’t a secret anymore because Myka was such a dork she couldn’t keep her mouth shut or her hands to herself. Their next, not-secret liaison, Myka swore, would be perfect, like Helena deserved. No crying or looming disasters, just the two of them. Finally.

            “Looking forward to it,” Myka said. “Be safe.”

            Helena nodded, hugged her, and vanished out the window. Myka stood in the middle of the floor blushing until Pete and the others came home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue from "40th Floor," by Benjamin Raab.


	14. Atlas 66

            “She’s gonna kill us,” Steve said. “You get that, right?”

            Marcus Diamond ignored him.

            “I mean, I know that doesn’t have the same impact for you, but I’ve read this woman’s records, I’ve talked to people who tried to fight her, and she’s gonna kick our asses so hard we’ll have sh…”

            “We do the job,” Marcus told him.

            Steve sighed. “Do we have a plan, at least?”

            Not that Steve was always the best at planning. He took what came at him and took it one step at a time. If you have to find Ulysses S. Grant’s flask, you go to the chest of flasks and start there; if you get a letter containing an engraving that tries to suffocate you, you ask the delivery boy who left that letter for you to die from. Simple, straightforward.

            Until this morning, Steve’s job had been fairly simple, too: find out Sykes’s endgame. He did what he was told and listened carefully. He kept the information he knew in the most inconspicuous way he could, which was currently a paper napkin in the pocket of his jacket. Granted, all he really knew was the address of the airplane hanger where Sykes was currently camped.

            That, and the fact that he wanted HG Wells, alive and with no head injuries.

            This was where it got complicated. Because the Regents wanted Wells, too, but Steve wasn’t sure how he was going to get her out of this scrape safely and still get information. And whose side was Wells going to fall on, anyway? Obviously Sykes wanted something she knew, but would she just hand it over, or would Steve have to manage the balance between letting Sykes get what he needed so Steve would know what the hell that was and making sure Wells didn’t get tortured to death?

            Steve shook his head and took deep, centering breaths. The countryside was beautiful, dark green from the first warm touches of summer.

            One thing at a time. First things first. Don’t let Wells kill you.

            Basically, the plan was to let Marcus go first.

            Thankfully, Marcus had a better plan.

            They parked at the end of the road, if you could call ten miles of slightly packed dirt a road, and hiked up the worn footpath to the cabin where Wells was stationed. Marcus dissolved into the woods and circled to the side while Steve went right up and knocked on the door.

            She didn’t answer. Not that he thought she would.

            “HG Wells? It’s Agent Jinks, from the Warehouse,” he called. Nothing. He winced, hated himself, and added, “Myka sent me.”

            Motion in the house, and the door opened just a crack.           

            “Is she alright?”

            “For now, but we need your help. You got a gun?”

            HG opened the door and shook her head. “Just this.”

            Steve caught a glimpse of the grappler, and HG was stepping outside and strapping the device to her back when Marcus came charging at her from the side. HG ducked and threw him over, and all hell broke loose.

            She made for the back door, and Steve followed. Marcus was already on his feet and running to head her off. HG flung the kitchen table in Steve’s path, made it a little ways outside, but he and Marcus managed to hem her in and drive her back indoors. She shot Marcus in the crotch with the grappling hook thing, though, before Steve disarmed her. Damn, she was impressive. The next few minutes were a tangle of furniture and fists, and Steve didn’t take another breath until he heard Marcus’s handcuffs click on her wrists.

            For maybe a second, the three of them stood panting in the wreckage. Marcus was bleeding from a cut over his eye, and his arms were wrapped around HG’s waist to pin her. HG’s eyes were flashing from pain to fear to fury. Steve stood right in front of her, and in the split second he had to think, he realized how stupid that was. Because HG threw her weight back on Marcus, jumped up, and mule kicked Steve in the chest.

            When he could see again, which might have been a while later, Marcus was pinning HG to the floor and shouting at Steve to tie her feet.

 _You’re kidding, right?_ he thought, but since he couldn’t say it, he just did what he was told while HG screamed gloriously poetic curses.

            This woman was everything her Warehouse file said she would be.

            Marcus gagged her, carefully, so she couldn’t bite, and grabbed her shoulders.

            “Help me take her.”

            “Give me a minute,” Steve finally coughed.

            Marcus rolled his eyes and threw HG, still thrashing, over his shoulder.

            Someone would come for her. If the Regents wanted her alive, she mattered, and they’d send someone to look for her. At the very least, the Warehouse would catch up soon, and Pete and Myka, and probably Claudia, too, would come charging in. Maybe even before he and Marcus made it down the road with her. The Regents would send backup. They had to know he couldn’t do this alone much longer.

            Steve righted a little table in the midst of Wells’ trashed cabin, left the napkin with Sykes’s address on it, and prayed it would be enough when the cavalry came. It was the only plan he had.

           

 

            Pete shoved the map, and Myka punched him.

            “Will you stop it? I’m trying to figure out where the hell we are!”

            “Yeah, well, I’m trying to see through the windshield. You seriously haven’t found us yet?”

            “No, Pete. I haven’t. And I wouldn’t have to if you had charged the GPS like I told you to! Or bothered to replace the car charger that _you_ destroyed three months ago. Three months, Pete! How hard is it to…”

            “Hey, where do you think that road leads?” Pete said.

            There was a hidden drive tucked in among the bushes.

            “I have no idea,” Myka said. “Probably nowhere, or to some hunting lodge where we’ll get shot at by rednecks for trespassing.”

            “Do they have rednecks in Minnesota?” Pete asked.

            Myka rolled her eyes. “They have rednecks everywhere. Just… No, wait. Yes! Yes, this is road we’re on! And Claudia’s directions say…”

            Pete drove past the dirt road, and Myka yelled while he did an illegal and wildly dangerous u-turn to go back to it. The Farnsworth blared through the chaos, and Myka stared at it guiltily.

            “Should we answer that? I mean, we’re already here. The worst Artie can do is yell at us.”

            “He might yell at us less if we have something useful to say when we talk to him,” Pete said.

            Myka wasn’t so sure about that, but she let the Farnsworth rattle, and let her cell phone ring (which was odd, because they hadn’t had cell reception for about an hour), all the way up the god-forsaken dirt road.

            Just past the sign marked “NO OUTLET,” about ten miles into the woods, Myka saw something moving. She drew her tesla and unbuckled her seatbelt, and when Pete hit the brakes, she jumped out of the car and pointed her tesla over the open door, shouting, “Federal agents! Put you hands in the air!”

            “Oh god, please don’t shoot me!”

            Standing up, the kid barely brushed five feet. Chinese, androgynous, unarmed as far as Myka could tell.

            “Bering and Lattimer, right?” the kid asked. “I-I know you. My dad works for the Warehouse.”

            Myka looked from the kid to the car. Familiar car.

            “You got a name?” Pete demanded.

            The kid nodded. “Thorndike. Lee Mai Thorndike.”

            “Yeah, well I don’t know any…”

            “Oh god,” Myka whispered. Thorndike, the car… “Atlas 66. Atlas house, 1866.”

            She spotted the winding upward trail and bolted toward it, shouting, “Helena!”

            Pete and Lee Mai followed her, and they were asking questions, but Myka didn’t care. She was up the hill in a flash, tearing up the porch steps, and stopping dead in the doorway of a ransacked cabin.

            “Myka, what the hell?” Pete demanded. “Do you know what’s going on?”

            “Give me the Farnsworth,” Myka snapped, because she could hear it buzzing in Pete’s pocket.

            Pete shook his head and tried to tell her, “I’m not giving you anything until you…”

            “Pete!”

            He jumped back when she commanded and fumbled the Farnsworth out of his pocket. Myka scratched him when she grabbed it away.

            “What did I tell you?” Artie roared when she flung the Farnsworth open.

            “Artie, I need to tell you something,” Myka pleaded, “and I need you to just listen to me, okay? Right now, because it’s important. Sykes took HG Wells.”

            Pete swore. Artie rubbed his face and muttered, “Oh that’s not good.”

            Myka wanted to defend her, to make Artie see that she was the threatened, not the threat, but there wasn’t time.

            “She’s been working for the Regents.”

            Chaos on the other end of the line. Myka talked over it.

            “There’s an artifact she thinks Sykes might have, and she asked me to look into it. Everything I know is in Helena’s desk in the agents’ vault. Get it out, and figure out how you shut the artifact down.”

            “Fair enough,” Artie growled. “And you find Wells before she rolls on us.”

            “She’s not going to roll on us, Artie!” Myka said.

            Artie glared at her. “Have you forgotten that they will _torture her_?”

            “Believe me, I haven’t!”

            Myka slammed the Farnsworth shut and turned back to the cabin.

            “What the hell, Mykes?” Pete asked when she shoved the Farnsworth back at him. She whirled on Lee Mai and didn’t answer.

            “What are you doing here? How did you find her?”

            Lee Mai blinked, and some part of Myka’s brain told her Lee Mai was just a kid, that they had no idea what was going on, that it must be terrifying, but most of Myka just didn’t care.

            “I-I have this,” Lee Mai said, and they pulled a static bag out of their pocket. “Rabbit’s foot. I found it in a suburb of Montreal, in a geocache. You know, those treasure boxes that people hide and you find it with GPS coordinates? No clue why it was there.”

            Myka studied the worn purple rabbit’s foot in the bag, then tucked in into her jacket pocket.

            “How does it work?”

            Lee Mai shrugged. “It’s a luck artifact, but from what I can tell, it’s sort of the too-little-too-late kind. Like, you ask a girl to the prom, and she’d love to, but someone else just asked her, or you get a winning lottery ticket, but they’re the numbers from yesterday. Which, now that I think about it, isn’t really all that lucky. I was hoping I could get lucky with it and find Helena, but…”

            They gestured to the cabin, and Myka nodded. Too little, too late.

            “Well, if you’d been here on time, you could have got hurt,” Pete said. “Sounds like luck to me.”

            “I’d rather have a chance to help my friend. I’m sorry, Agent Bering. I know that’s her car down the hill, but I just got here a minute before you guys did. I didn’t see anything.”

            “It’s okay,” Myka told them, even though it wasn’t. She checked her watch and started thinking aloud. “It’s three thirty now. Two of the six Regents were killed within twelve hours of their disappearance; the other four lasted about a day. The shorter-lived ones were the most recent, which means Sykes is either getting better at extraction or more desperate. Either way, Helena’s tough, so I’d split the difference and say we have about eighteen hours. So let’s…”

            “Hey!” Pete shouted. “How do you know all of this? Who is this kid? And why the hell have you been talking to HG Wells?”

            Myka shook her head and marched into the cabin, saying, “Later. There’s no time.”

            “No way, Mykes. You can’t just drop all this on me and expect me to…”

            “He’s gonna kill her!”

            It was so loud, and so terrifyingly true, that it hurt even Myka’s ears when she yelled it. She was shaking, and Lee Mai looked like they were going to panic or cry, but Myka stood as steady as she could and begged.

            “He’s gonna kill her, Pete. And I need you to back me up on this, because I can’t save her alone. Please.”

            Pete put his hands on his hips, sighed, and Myka was ready to get on her knees to beg him when he finally said, “Fine. Let’s look for clues, see if we can find out what he wanted, or where he took her.”

            Lee Mai jumped right in, ran a hand along the doorframe, and when a section of wall sprung loose, declared, “Secret panel number one! Empty.”

            “Would this fit in it?” Pete asked, holding out Helena’s grappler.

            It did. He and Lee Mai started tapping the walls and baseboards while Myka righted the kitchen table and spread Helena’s scattered books and papers across it. A guide to the internet, menus for Theodora Stanton’s restaurant, a map of the United States highway system, the instruction manual for a GPS (“Secret panel number two!” Lee Mai called and pulled the GPS and a laptop out of a cubby in the corner where Helena’s mattress pressed against the wall) and a pile of notebooks and scraps of paper covered in Helena’s handwriting. Diary entries and personal thoughts in French, and in English, the beginnings of new manuscript, all out of order now.

            Helena had been writing. Myka could imagine her, curled up on the battered mattress in the corner, pen in hand, and a cup of steaming tea on that little table beside the… Wait.

            That little table was the only piece of furniture left standing. Myka scooped the rumpled quilt off the floor, and underneath a corner of it was a shattered teacup.

            “Guys, look at this!” Myka called. “See the way the tea spilled? From this direction.”

            She put a large-ish piece of the cup on top of the little table and tipped it all over, toward the floor. Pete gasped.

            “This table got knocked over during the fight!”

            “Which means, everything that was on top of it should be on the floor!” Myka declared.

            She waved the paper napkin triumphantly.

            “So if that was put on top of the table after the fight, it has to be a clue,” Lee Mai clarified. “But who put it there? Helena? If she got away and circled back, she wouldn’t leave the grappler behind, and she’d probably at least try to get to her car.”

            “But the keys are still by the door,” Pete observed.

            “Well, Jane said the Regents had a plan in place, right? Maybe they sent backup to help her, but they didn’t make it in time, so they left a clue for us to find when we got here while they went on ahead to… No. No, that doesn’t quite make sense.”

            Myka frowned and kept thinking. Pete pulled out the Farnsworth.

            “Lets just show it to Claudia and have her find out what it is first. Maybe that’ll help.”

            “Please tell me you found her,” was the first thing out of Claudia’s mouth when she picked up.

            “We found something,” Pete told her, and Myka thanked whatever force of fortune that was in control of this disaster, that he didn’t notice the subtext of Claudia’s urgency about HG. The last thing they needed was for Pete to be pissed at her, too.

            Pete read her the note, and Claudia had an answer within seconds.

            “Okay, Skybrook is a decommissioned airport in Featherhead, probably hangar 3. BFFE might be an airplane registration or a license plate number or… hold up. Let me see that thing.”

            Myka took the napkin from Pete and held it up to the camera.

            “BFFE, best friends for ever. It’s Steve!” Claudia shouted. “That’s his handwriting. Artie, it’s Steve!”

            Artie snatched Claudia’s Farnsworth away from her and started barking orders. They were to come back to the Warehouse immediately, get tesla rifles (courtesy of Claudia’s genius), and take Claudia as backup to raid the airport. He would hold down the fort and keep looking into the artifact HG and Myka had been investigating.

            “Go. Now,” he barked, and the screen went black.

            Myka grabbed Helena’s laptop and GPS and headed out the door, calling over her shoulder to Lee Mai, “You should get home. Your dad has Regent security posted, the area should be secure.”

            “I wanna help.”

            “You can’t.”

            “He already has, Mykes,” Pete protested.

            “They,” Lee Mai corrected.

            “They, they, sorry. Wait, what? Never mind. Look, Myka, the kid found an artifact, and then they found HG freakin’ Wells. They’re safe with us, and then we can drop them off at the Warehouse, which is like, the safest place on earth, and they can help Artie. We need help.”

            Lee Mai nodded, saying, “There’s all kinds of stuff I can do. She taught me.”

            “She” being Helena. They’d picked up the grappler, and they held it comfortably.

            “Myka,” Pete started again, and it was obvious he was going to fight her on this. Helena would be pissed, but Helena was in danger, and there wasn’t time to waste. Lee Mai would be safe with Warehouse agents, safer than if they were travelling alone. Myka marched down the hill and didn’t protest when the kid climbed in the back of the car.

 

 

            When Sykes told them to “uncuff our guest,” Steve let Marcus deal with the feet. He uncuffed and untied HG’s hands, and she pulled the bit out of her mouth herself. And then she spat at him.

            “Some agent,” she growled before turning and saying conversationally, “You must be Mister Sykes.”

            “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Sykes said.

            She took the glass of water he held out and immediately started looking around. Didn’t ask questions or try to fight, just sat on the couch Marcus had dumped her on and looked at everything around her. It was smart of Sykes to bring her in here, Steve thought, away from the pile of artifacts. Who knew what she was actually seeing, or thinking about what she saw.

            “We’ll be on our way here shortly, Miss Wells,” Sykes told her, and if she’d looked at Steve that way, sharp as razors, he would have been terrified. “Is there anything I can get you while we wait? A book, some food, an ice pack?”

            “I’ll take a tesla, if you have it.”

            Sykes laughed and turned away. Marcus had left the room, to help Tyler load the plane, Steve guessed, and he relaxed a bit. If Sykes wasn’t going to hurt HG, that made his job a lot easier.

            Time to feed her what he knew.

            “Our clearance for landing in Hong Kong is flexible, right? We’re a bit behind schedule, and we can’t afford to wait for a second clearance.”

            Sykes turned to him.

            “It’s best not to underestimate the Warehouse,” Steve warned, “so we have to assume they’re not far behind us.”

            “That’s sound advice,” Sykes said. “Now Steve, I want you to know this wouldn’t have been possible without your help, buddy.”

            Truth.

            It was meant to be a compliment, Steve assumed, but it hurt.

            Not as much as Marcus grabbing him, though. There were a few seconds to observe two last things. First, HG had seen Marcus coming and leapt up to save him, whether because she knew he was on her side or because that was just the way she was, he had no idea. Second, Sykes had said those words to hurt him. He had known.

            Steve closed his eyes and hoped for peace.

 

 

            Claudia gave Lee Mai a high five as she dashed toward the car, and then Lee Mai was alone in the Badlands with Artie Nielson. _The_ Artie Nielson, Warehouse agent supreme, the man legends were made of in the Thorndike household.

            “Are you coming or not?” he growled, and Lee Mai jumped to attention and trotted into the umbilicus behind him.

            “Mister Niels, er, Agent Nielson, I just want to thank you for letting me help. I know the Warehouse is special, and not just anyone can…”

            “Do not touch anything,” Artie interrupted. “Especially the bombs. You will sit at the table in my office exactly where I put you, and you will do exactly what I say. You will not enter the Warehouse floor, you will not disrupt official business, and you will not involve yourself in direct confrontation in any way. Is that understood?”

            Lee Mai nodded. Artie planted them in a chair, plopped down a heap of papers, and then sat at his desk with a grunt. There was a dog in the corner, but when Lee Mai tried to call him over, he only snuffed at her, and Artie glared. Over the next hour, every time Lee Mai glanced up from their papers, the dog growled.

            “What?” Lee Mai finally snapped.

            “Tray is a good dog, and he knows the rules. Don’t you, Tray?”

            The dog barked. Lee Mai was going to protest that they knew the rules, too, unless not looking at things was a rule they’d missed, but the Farnsworth rattled.

            “Is that victory I hear?” they asked.

            Artie scoffed, “It’s rarely that simple.”

 

 

            When the call was over, Myka shut the Farnsworth and took a deep breath, like a diver before the plunge. She could do this. She could hold it together, for the whole team if she had to.

            Pete had saved her. If she’d thought, even for a second, that it was Helena in that room, she would have broken down completely. Not that losing Steve was any better. God, nothing could be worse. But the fear of losing Helena and the desperation to be there for her, to not let her go through this alone, were what Myka was driving herself with. If Helena was lost, so was Myka’s focus, and everything would spin out of control.

            _Stay focused, slim,_ she told herself, and she was almost grateful for Colorado, now, for the reminder of what Sam had nurtured in her. _Don’t get emotional._

            “Hey,” she said when she’d made it, somehow, back upstairs. “I uh, I told Artie. So the Regents are going to send someone to get… For Steve.”

            Because he was Steve, not a body. Everyone in the room could feel that. And no one in the room had moved since Myka had left them. She’d hoped telling them that Steve would be taken care of would help them snap out of the trance-like funeral state they were in, but it didn’t. Myka lifted her chin, gathered her composure for a second try, and said, “Pete?"

            “How could this happen? It’s just…”

            He was helpless. Emotional. That was fine. It wasn’t him she needed, anyway. She crouched down, next to Steve’s knee, and called gently, “Claudia? Listen to me. We need you to hack into that laptop, okay? There could be something there that…”

            Nothing. Fine. Maybe gentle wasn’t the way to go.

            “Claudia, listen to me,” Myka insisted, and her voice got harsher, a little louder, the longer Claudia ignored her. “We need to find Sykes, right? We need to find him, and we need to stop him. Claudia?”

            “Myka!”

            Myka turned to Pete, calm as she could be, even though his jaw was set and his eyes were wide in anger.

            “Yeah?”

            “Steve is dead. How can you just be business as usual?”

            Because it was what has to be done. Because anger wasn’t helping anything, or fear or pain or love or…

            “Because if I don’t, I will lose it,” Myka told him. “So you need to help me.”

            He understood, thank god, and even better, he knew what to do. With the promise that Steve wouldn’t be alone, that Pete would hold his hand, Claudia was able to stand up. Myka couldn’t help but regret not being able to figure that out, to be there for her. But Pete could do that while Myka charged ahead, and that would just have to be good enough.

            Not that it was, in the end. Myka combed the entire building looking for clues and found nothing. Claudia wouldn’t budge until the Regents arrived, and it cost them almost an hour. They left the hangar empty-handed.

 

 

            Helena was long past trembling. The little plane she was in twitched and puttered through the air, and it wasn’t as fast as the major jet airliners nowadays, but it would still have stolen her breath away if she could feel anything at all.

            “You’re not too talkative, Miss Wells,” Sykes said, and Helena was so far away that she’d nearly forgotten he was there. “Penny for your thoughts?”

            She stared out the window and answered, “You killed that young man in cold blood.”

            Pointless. Everything around her descended into merciless violence. She made a limp effort at hopelessness, but fell short of the passion such despair demanded.

            “Really? What temperature was your blood when you killed?”

            She turned to him sharply; Walter Sykes was watching her like a heat ray, and she felt a jolt of pain.

            “You think you turned your life around, working for these people? ‘Cause it seems to me you’re just a dog that licks the boot that kicks her.”

            “Dogs bite,” Helena told him.

            Sykes laughed, challenging, “Are you gonna hurt me? I doubt you’ll kill me.”

            Helena studied him, the gleam of wild anticipation in his eyes, the way he leaned toward her like she’d just promised to tell him a secret.

            “Is that what you want?”

            “Give it a try and let’s find out.”

            It was, at least, something to do. Perhaps she could make him reveal something, and the puzzle gave her strength. She lunged for him.

            The stopping of her muscles wrenched her elbow and cramped her fingers. Sykes twisted a glowing riding crop in his hands and smirked at her. A firm press of his hands on the leather, and Helena’s hand flung itself in square motions back into her lap.

            The pain made her angry; the glow of the crop, so like the trident, made her afraid.

            “What do you want from me?” Helena snapped.

            “Some advice.”

            “I’d strongly recommend a good psychologist,” Helena quipped.

            She couldn’t move. It was undignified at best, and the anger was slowly picking up steam. Not that it helped, because Sykes was quite clearly in control of this. Helena rolled her eyes and played by his rules.

            “Advice on what?”

            “Opening a certain lock,” Sykes said. He pulled out a notebook, red, with a hot air balloon, and Helena reached for it. Sykes didn’t let her even touch it. “According to this, you got an old friend who taught you how to do it, right? Somebody named Caturanga.”

            The comfort of Caturanga clashed with the confusion and frustration of the moment. Her memories could take her easily down the secret passages into Warehouse 12, and she could be safe there until Sykes ripped her out of her mind again. There were days when the pull of such dissociation was too appealing to resist. But not now.

            “I’ll die before I help you,” she growled.

            Because she was almost certainly going to die, and if she didn’t stay present and make herself useful somehow, she wouldn’t be the last.

            “Oh, you’ll help me,” Sykes told her. “Whether you live or die is entirely up to you.”

            Helena turned away and stared out the window again.

 

 

            Claudia had bullied HG’s phone number out of the Regents, but she just got voicemail, which meant it was off, or maybe it’d been in her pocket during the fight and got smashed. Which would probably hurt. She kept calling every five minutes, just in case, until Artie made her stop, and then she started trolling through Steve’s computer, looking for something that might be useful.

            Artie wouldn’t let her put her headphones in, said she needed to be attentive in case someone said something that clicked. Inspiration could strike at any moment. Mostly, Claudia was feeling inspired to kill Jane Lattimer. She was standing in the middle of the office, trying to explain what had happened.

            “When we became aware that Wells had been compromised, we alerted Agent Jinks and instructed him to keep her safe. If things went south, Agent Jinks would intervene, and Wells, being the smart woman she is, would quickly pick up whose side he was on. There was no reason to suspect that the two of them together couldn’t make it out, and to remove Wells from play would only make Walter Sykes change tactics just when we were so close to understanding what his plan was. And every change of plan Sykes has leads to more death.”

            “More Regent death,” Claudia corrected.

            Pete said, before Claudia and Jane could really go at it, “But why not just tell HG about Jinks? I mean, if she’d known…”

            “If she’d known, it would have increased the risk that they would be compromised, and then we’d have lost them both.”

            “We still might.”

            That was Myka, and she hadn’t said a word in almost an hour. Claudia was consciously not looking at Jane, but out of the corner of her eye, she could see the woman moving closer to Myka, which didn’t exactly seem like a good idea right now.

            “Agent Bering, I…” Jane began, but Myka snapped, “Don’t.”

            “I know what you meant to her, and if…”

            “Mom,” Pete warned, and thank god for that boy. “There’s nothing you can say.”

            Claudia could hear Jane’s shoes cross the office and go out onto the Warehouse floor.

            Artie barreled in then, back from convening with Mrs. F, and asked the stupidest question he could have come up with: “You guys alright?”

            Myka and Lee Mai didn’t answer.

            “We are on the other side of the world from alright,” Pete said. “We found this stuff on him.”

            Pete had gone through Steve’s pockets, gently, while Claudia washed his face before the Regents came for him. They’d put all the stuff, wallet, receipts, cell phone, in plastic bag. She could hear it rustling now, on the table behind her.

            “I didn’t even know the guy smoked,” Pete continued.

            He was holding up a cigarette lighter when Claudia spun around. She snatched it from him, and finally, finally, she had something to work with.

 

 

            At first, while they were driving to the airport to catch a plane to Hong Kong, Pete didn’t talk to Myka. Then while they were boarding he said his mom was going into Mother Mode on Claudia. He could see the signs: constant looking in her direction, a lowering and sing-songing of the voice, and a particular frown at the corner of her mouth.

            “Claud’ll bite her head off,” Myka said.

            “That’s what Jennie did, too, when Dad died. They fought all the time.”

            Myka put a hand on his shoulder, left it there until Artie called them with information. Out came the maps, the Agent instincts, and that one Intro to Chinese course Myka had taken at Colorado State. Once they were on the ground, she and Pete would be headed to Tai Po, the center of the Eye of Horus, and unless Artie and the gang found something else, they’d wing it from there. Pete’s specialty.

            She was feeling better, or at least resolved, when Pete started talking to her again.

            “I don’t get it, Mykes.”

            “What, Walter Sykes?”

            “No,” Pete said. “You and her. I mean, you’re friends, you obviously have a lot in common, with the books and the girl power stuff, and she’s a convincing lady, but why do lie for her? Why do you lie to me?”

            “I didn’t! She was undercover, Pete. I kept our meetings secret so I could keep her safe,” Myka tried to explain.

            Pete zeroed in on the plural, growling, “Oh great! You did it more than once? And what if she’s lying, Mykes? She was before.”

            “It’s different now.”

            “Why? Because a shrink and an eighteen-year-old said so? Because _she_ said so?”

            “Why are you so defensive?” Myka snapped. “I get that you and HG aren’t on the same page, exactly, but…”

            “She hurt you!”

            A man in the seat in front of them looked back with that ugly face rubberneckers get. Myka slumped down and rammed her knee into his seat. Pete kept talking, but quieter, thank god.

            “She hurt you, Myka, and that bugs me, because I’ve always been there for you. We’re partners, right? But then she shows up, and you totally shut me out. It’s all secret meetings and ‘just trust me on this’ and … and I don’t get why you trust her more than me.”

            Oh god.

            “Pete, it’s not like that,” Myka said.

            “It is, though,” Pete told her. “I’ve told you stuff that I’ve never told anybody, and you’re still hiding stuff from me. Do you hide stuff from her?”

            Myka looked away. Sure, she hid things from Helena. Mostly the one thing, the thing she wasn’t very good at hiding and was sure as hell not going to tell Pete. She’d never said it, and she couldn’t bear to now, not right before Helena was gone forever.

            “Pete, I can’t. I want to explain it, but I don’t know how. Please, please let’s just find her and get this over with, and then we can…”

            “Sure,” Pete said. “Count on me.”

            They didn’t say anything else for hours. Not for the rest of the flight, or barreling through the Hong Kong airport, renting a car, driving down the highway to Tai Po, and straight through the cheery late-night streets to the dead center of the city.

            It was a Chinese restaurant. Myka would have given up, moved on, but Pete came through. They found Helena, at the end of a long, damp corridor with lights that Myka couldn’t find an explanation for. Funny, how Myka saw the skeletons first, because they were in her line of sight while looking at Helena. Pete looked up and saw the blade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue from "Stand," by Andrew Kreisberg & Drew Z. Greenberg.


	15. Stand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning: dissociation, mention of alcohol

            At first, Helena had refused to play the game.

            “That’s fine,” Sykes had told her. “I can just make you shoot him instead.”

            “Why him and not me? He’s served you faithfully for…”

            “Tyler’s a good kid. You on the other hand, you’re a Warehouse agent. I put you in the chair, you sacrifice yourself, and I don’t get my answer. So you have two options, Miss Wells: you play, and you save him, or you keep standing there until you pull that trigger.”

            Helena thought long and hard. When her focus slipped, she shifted her weight onto her right ankle, badly turned in Minnesota, and let the pain white out her distractions.

            She chose the wrong move. Once, twice, and it was clear that there was only one more move to make. Helena decided, announced, but told Tyler not to make the move. Not that the boy was so inclined anyway.

            “Please Mister Sykes,” Tyler wept.

            “Don’t make him do it.”

            “Tyler,” Sykes said, “You’ve got to be in it to win it! Now.”

            Against Helena’s judgment, Tyler slid her selected piece across the chessboard. The board made its own move.

            “Checkmate,” Helena whispered.

            The blade fell, and Helena turned away, shrieking. Tyler himself didn’t have the chance to.

            “First show’s over!” Sykes shouted, before Helena was prepared to handle sound. “Lattimer and Bering? Come on down!”

            She saw Myka stalk down the steps of the Regent Sanctum, gun in hand, and she had just an instant to be grateful, to contemplate relief, before her arms ripped upward, wrenching her shoulder, and the gun discharged in her hand.

            “Myka, are you alright? I didn’t do that!”

            Everything sounded like it was filtered through cotton, but she could hear Myka distantly, saying, “No, I’m, I’m fine.”

            Sykes started barking orders at them, and when they didn’t obey, he threatened Myka. Helena tensed even more than she already had, and the muscles Sykes had pulled from jerking her around ached.

            Pete and Myka wanted to know about the chess lock, about Caturanga. Helena explained what she knew, but turned to shout at Sykes again that while she understood the device in principle, she did _not_ know the answer. Sykes only mocked her.

            And then he squinted at her, and his face sparked with intrigue.

            “You know what?” he said. “Maybe I used the wrong incentive.”

            What he meant by that was a puzzle Helena quickly solved, and she shouted and railed, but she couldn’t stop her own hands from thrusting Myka into the chair.

           

 

            King’s knight to E-6. Check.

            The board made its own move, sliding a piece into place automatically, which was one of the creepiest things Myka had ever seen, even without the fact that it was going to kill her.

            Check.

            The blade above her head clanged downward just a little. Pete tried to dive for Helena, but how much would that have actually helped? Clearly the chair was possessed, too, so they’d still have to beat the possessed chess game to get her out. Although the automatic locking mechanism could probably be explained through some kind of weight sensing device, and she was seriously at the point of analyzing the device that was trying to kill her so she could block out the gunshots and shouting and Helena’s helplessness.

            Queen’s bishop to B-4. Check.

            The evil chessboard made its move, and the blade clanged further down. Myka couldn’t stop her whimper, and Helena nearly screamed.

            “I don’t know what else to do!” she wailed.

            “Helena.”

            “Continuing,” Sykes ordered.

            Helena was openly weeping then, and she looked at Myka with such agonized affection while she whispered, “I’m sorry, Myka.”

            And okay, Myka got that she was probably going to die. That was just the cold hard truth. But Helena needed to be believed in, to be trusted, and she deserved that, no matter what happened. Myka had wanted to be there for her, and now, well, she had the one last chance. She would die with her faith in Helena Wells.

 

 

            Helena’s hands sweated around the gun, and she wished to god she could drop it. There were memories, right at the edge of her mind if she would let herself fall into them; the desire to dissociate was itching and scratching below the brittle surface of her focus. But if she lost focus, let herself calm herself and fall away, Sykes would wrench her arms up and pull the trigger. There was nothing to do but to stay here, to fight for the last seconds while Myka slipped away.

            “Helena, listen to me,” Myka demanded, and Helena tried. “I am not going to die here today, okay? Because you are going to take a breath, and you’re gonna save my life.”

            There was a strange smell in the room, one Helena hadn’t noticed before. A smell like water and olive trees. Helena breathed deep, because Myka had told her to, and a vision took her under.

            Dark skinned and richly curved like the winding Sacred Way, the Pythia appeared before her.

            “If things had been different,” the Pythia said, and the Sanctum was empty, the chess pieces scattered on the floor, “you’d have found your answer by now. Funny thing, that. The flashbacks, the night terrors, they happen for a reason: to protect us. Most of the time, they’ve outlived their usefulness, but sometimes we need them still. The world will always be cruel to us.”

            Helena nodded vaguely and looked at her hands. They were empty, and they moved of their own accord.

            “I’ll lose my mind if I lose Myka. You brought me here to protect me.”

            The Pythia smiled, and the pity in her face didn’t rub Helena as raw as it had before.

            “Wrong. You’d hold on, just like she’d want you to.”

            She kicked a chess piece. Helena bent to pick it up: a pawn.

            “I was the last oracle at Delphi because someone finally realized that oracles harm as many people as they help. I was human once, like you. I want to make things right, to be redeemed for the harm I’ve done. But instead I’ve led you to this disaster.”

            “It’s not your fault,” Helena told her.

            The Pythia smiled. “Good girl. I have a gift for you.”

            Helena looked down at the pawn in her hand. She found instead her stolen pistol.

            “What is this?”

            “A Webley mark one .450 caliber, standard issue of the Royal Navy and police constabularies. A fine weapon!”

            Caturanga was beaming at her from his chair in Warehouse 12, and Helena was dizzy with the visions she was having. While her mind was trying to get the facts sorted, her mouth spoke on automatic pilot.

            “Guns have no place in a civilized society, sir.”

            She remembered this. It was the memory she’d nearly fallen into, the one she’d been trying to block. The Pythia had forced her into it.

            Caturanga presented the tesla, poor McShane fell stunned to the floor, and Helena knew what she needed to know.

            She opened her eyes, and the Regent Sanctum asserted itself again: the smell of dust and bones, the dim light, and the game spread out in front of Myka, waiting. The whole series of hallucinations had lasted only as long as her breath.

            “Change the rules,” Helena whispered as she exhaled. She spotted the little pawn in D-3 and declared, “Myka? D-3 to E-8.”

            “Helena, I can’t move my pawn that way.”

            “I know. Change the rules.”

            She was calm now, almost smiling, and Myka slid her pawn across the board and knocked the enemy king over, smacking her pawn into its place.

            “Checkmate,” Helena said.

            The chair released Myka, who leapt to her feet and dove for Helena while the earth shook and the ceiling caved in. Helena put herself between Myka and Sykes. Pete kicked the gun away from her (free from the horrible thing at last), and the muddle of her brain didn’t process the tesla in Pete’s hand as anything other than friendly before it was too late.

            The rest was silence.

 

 

            “Listen to this,” Lee Mai said, and Artie looked at them, stricken. Apparently he’d forgotten Lee Mai was there at all, and now they were trapped in the Warehouse, same as Artie and Jane, thanks to the Remati shackle. Not that Lee Mai minded. They handed a book to Artie and pointed to a passage.

            “So the House of Commons chunk is fueled by hate, right? According to this, you can stop it at the source through hate’s opposite.”

            “Love,” Jane suggested.

            “I don’t think so,” Lee Mai said. “Just look at Helena. Her love for her daughter is what made her hate everyone else, right? It wasn’t a flip of a switch in her, it was a perfectly natural flow. Hate and love are both kinetic, active things, and they can both be good or bad, depending on how you use them. I think the opposite would be…”

            Artie held up a hand to stop them talking. Something was wrong. He and Jane ran out onto the balcony, and Lee Mai followed. When they tried to see through the periscope, Artie grabbed their shoulders and shoved them back into the office.

            “You stay here, you understand? Don’t move, don’t touch anything, don’t talk to strangers! Tray, you stay with this kid, okay? Good boy.”

            Lee Mai grabbed his sleeve before he bolted.

            “Peace,” they told him. “The opposite is peace.”

            Artie paused and cocked his head, muttering, “That’s very good. Very smart, very… And we have something for that. I think it’s in Portugal 80347. That’s really good.”

            He trailed off, snapped out of it, and hurtled down the stairs to the Warehouse floor.

           

 

            “Helena? Helena, come on, wake up.”            

            Pete’s tesla had been on the lowest setting, so Myka hadn’t even really lost consciousness. Helena, however, was still failing to stir. After everything she’d been through today, her body might have just done a hard shutdown and put her to sleep. But Myka needed her, so she shook her until her eyes cracked open. They focused on the rapidly closing portal almost immediately, and Helena struggled to her feet, shouting, “Oh god, don’t wait for me! Go!”

            Myka bolted for the portal in the wall, and Helena was right behind her, but neither of them made it in time.

            “They must have shut it down from the other side,” Helena said.

            She turned away from the wall and limped back into the Sanctum. Myka scowled at the wall, searching for clues.

            “There’s gotta be another way to open this, I just… I just gotta think.”

            But when she turned around, Helena was already calmly sitting in the evil murder chair of death, resetting the chessboard.

            Oh great. Okay. Myka knelt down by Helena’s feet and helped round up the scattered pieces. She remembered how the board was set up. If they had to play this game again, they could do that.

            “Myka?” Helena said. “Thank you.”

            “For what?” Myka said, because that was a little ridiculous. When this disaster was over, Myka had every intention of thanking Helena, not the other way around.

            “After all I’ve done, and with your life in my hands, you still trusted me. It’s a gift I haven’t earned, but I treasure it nonetheless. In future, I swear I intend to…”

            “You make a lot of speeches, don’t you?”

            Helena looked a bit sheepish, rolling a rook in her hand. “Almost a year of therapy and pleading for one’s life will do that to a person, I suppose. My point stands.”

            “You point is stupid,” Myka told her, and that was a little harsh, but she didn’t have time for this. “Of course I trust you, Helena. We’re partners. You have my back, and I have yours. Now quit with your self-flagellating… loner, martyr complex and help me solve this!”

            For a minute, Helena just stared at her. Then she smiled. God, Myka hadn’t seen her look genuinely amused in ages.

            “Righty-ho, then,” Helena said. “Old times. Wells and Bering, solving puzzles, saving the day.”

            “Bering and Wells.”

 

 

            Lee Mai flicked some goo from a canister onto the chain mail in the corner before they touched it, just in case it was an artifact. It wasn’t. Tray whined at them anyway, but Lee Mai shushed him.

            “I’m scared, okay? And you can never be too careful.”

            They pulled the chain mail on over their head, put on a hard hat, and sat at Artie’s desk with the grappler across their knees.

            Nothing happened.

            “Screw it,” Lee Mai said after about three minutes of nothing happening, and they slipped out onto the balcony and stared out of the periscope.

            Artie was running one way, with a scarf fluttering out of his pocket, and Jane was catching up to him. A blond guy Lee Mai didn’t know was making a break for a huge glowing hole in the wall, where Agent Lattimer was standing guard. Agent Bering and, thank god, Helena, were bolting down the aisles from another direction. They weren’t going to make it in time. The blond guy was getting away.

            Lee Mai turned, with fear and trembling, to the zip line.

            Every Warehouse agent had a special talent. Agent Bering had her breathtaking observation, Agent Lattimer his vibes, and Helena… well, she was Helena. Lee Mai had a superpower, too: they could turn themself invisible.

            It was a magic trick in the classic sense: misdirection, but expanded not just to which hand a person was watching, but to where their attention fell in the room. A subtlety of movement through space combined with a knowledge of what people are paying attention to at any given time, such that Lee Mai could move from dead zone to dead zone without drawing anyone’s eye, had made them a master of sneaking through even the most crowded parties unseen.

            No one looked up as Lee Mai sailed overhead on the zip line, from one end of the Warehouse to the other. There was a bang and clatter when they dropped from the zip line harness to a catwalk above the glowing hole in the wall, but no one heard. Lee Mai watched the blond man turn a corner and charge toward the portal, saw Agent Lattimer tense for the fight. Above his head, Lee Mai settled the grappler on the catwalk railing, aimed, and fired.

 

 

            Myka had never liked the sound of handcuffs as much as she had when she was putting them on Sykes. The man was still gasping for breath; Lee Mai had hit him square in the chest. He could barely put up a fight when Pete yanked the Collodi bracelet off his wrist, though he did get a solid punch to the knee in. Pete was limping almost as badly as Helena was, and complaining three times as much.

            Helena wasn’t nearly as pissed off about Lee Mai being in the Warehouse as Myka had been afraid she would be. She was heaping praise on the kid, and she’d only shot Pete a brief glare of death when Myka had informed her it was his idea to bring them along. Artie was on the Farnsworth, checking in with Claudia. Myka was about to lean in and say hello when Jane held up her arm.

            “We’re not out of Dodge, yet, kids,” she said.

            Artie sputtered and checked the Warehouse monitors for information. Helena shoved Lee Mai toward the still-open portal, ordering them out. Lee Mai protested, but Jane took them by the hand and pulled them out of the Warehouse.

            Sykes, predictably, told them nothing. Lucky for them, he didn’t have to.

            “The House of Commons artifact. Myka, how do you stop…” Helena started, but Artie cut her off.

            “Gandhi’s dhoti,” he announced, whipping it out of his pocket, “creates an all-consuming sense of peace.”

            “Which sounds great until you get so chilled out your heart stops,” Pete added. “Don’t his sandals do the same thing?”

            Artie nodded. “Yes, the shoes and the dhoti work most quickly in unison, but I didn’t know how to put sandals on a chunk of wall. I can, however, wrap it up with this. And the peace should quell Sykes’s hatred and neutralize the artifact.”

            “Great plan, Artie, but here’s the thing.” Pete spread his hands wide and asked, “Where is it?”

            Myka was edging closer to panic, ready to throw everyone else out the emergency exit and charge ahead on her own, when a light bulb went off over Artie’s head. He ordered Pete to watch Sykes and dragged Myka and Helena behind him into the stacks.

 

 

            “Did he think he was just going to walk out of here with the Collodi bracelet?” Artie railed. “He said he was going to kill us all, but he never tried to. But a man who can walk does not need…”

            The three of them sprinted the last few feet to Sykes’s wheelchair, and Artie uncovered the bomb. He shoved purple gloves into Helena’s hands and told her to hold it while he wrapped it. Then he stood back, and everything was quiet.

            For half an instant, they thought the battle was over. Then the bomb continued ticking in Helena’s arms.

            “The source,” Myka said. “Lee Mai said it had to be cut off from the source, right? But all the documents I found said the artifact fed off hatred. If it were constantly active, it would be destructive constantly, but it needs contact, it needs fuel from a direct source.”

            “It needs Sykes,” Artie said.

            Helena protested, “You said the dhoti would stop his heart!” but no one seemed to hear.

            Artie checked the time remaining on the bomb, then shoved Helena toward the Ovoid Quarantine, saying, “Put it there and get back to the exit. The Quarantine should take the edge off the blast if putting the dhoti on Sykes doesn’t work. Go, now!”

            Helena ran as much as her ankle could bear, which got her most of the way to the Ovoid Quarantine, and she limped the rest of the way. Once there, she plunged the bomb into a can of neutralizer and began fiddling with the generator in the corner. If she remembered correctly how the shackle worked, then there should be a way to divert a portion of its energy, make a second shield.

            It was consoling to know that Claudia was safe at Leena’s, that Lee Mai was safe with Jane in Hong Kong. With a little luck, Helena could save them all. Granted, a blast from this artifact, contained to a small bubble on the floor, might stretch so deep into the earth that the hole would spew lava, and they’d be trapped in the Warehouse until that was taken care of, and god knows what that would do to the earth itself, but there weren’t all that many options at the moment, now, were there? The others wouldn’t make it to the Ovoid Quarantine in time for her to shelter them if it came to that, and someone would have to stay behind to close the emergency exit portal, or the blast would pour out into the restaurant basement and, at best, blow the whole block apart.

            The sparks were flying, the bomb was surrounded by as large a bubble as Helena could manage, to distribute the blast, when Myka came skidding into the quarantine. The shield Helena had made vanished, which meant the Remati shackle was dormant at last. For a while, Helena and Myka just stared at each other.

            “You okay?” Myka finally asked.

            Helena shrugged. “Brandy and a hot bath would get me closer to it.”

            Myka laughed and held out her hand for Helena to take.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue from "Stand," by Andrew Kreisberg & Drew Z. Greenberg.


	16. That Noble Swing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for: mentions of alcohol

            Trying to convince Helena to go to the hospital was useless.

            “It’ll take hours,” she’d complained when Myka suggested it. “I just want to be at home with you.”

            How could Myka argue with that? She checked the woman for broken bones, and finding none, she gave in and helped Helena limp to the car. Pete and Artie were right behind them, and they all tramped into the B&B like rag dolls.

            Mrs. Frederick was in the living room. Before she’d even thought about it, Myka had put herself between the Caretaker and Helena.

            “At ease, Agent Bering,” Mrs. Frederick said. “I’m given to understand that wresting HG Wells from your care would be not unlike fighting a tiger.”

            “You’d stand a chance against the tiger,” Helena quipped.

            Mrs. Frederick actually smiled at that, and Myka wasn’t sure this day could get any weirder.

            Helena put a hand on Myka’s shoulder so she could step forward, and asked, “New orders, ma’am?”

            “It appears that the battle is won, and so your service is ended. Once the Regents have attended to those matters relevant to today’s incident, we will begin to discuss your reinstatement. Until then, go home to your family, get some rest.” Mrs. Frederick began to turn, then glanced back to Helena and added, “And rest easy, Agent Wells.”

            And for a second there, Myka was almost ready to celebrate.

 

 

            When Helena relaxed, her muscles throbbed with exhaustion. She ignored the ache and smiled at Myka, whose hand reached up to cover hers. Was happiness that easy, then?

            She turned her relief to Claudia, and realized that it was not. Of course it wasn’t. Because fluid, effervescent Claudia was all stiff lines and ridges, and her hand was clamped around an artifact that Helena couldn’t quite believe she was laying eyes on.

            “You’re going to have to give that back now, Claudia,” Mrs. Frederick said.

            Claudia didn’t move. Neither did Helena; she could hardly breathe.

            Mrs. Frederick warned, “I’ve asked you before. I won’t do it again.”

            “And I’ve told you, it’s for Steve,” Claudia snarled.            

            “What is it?” Helena whispered.

            Mrs. Frederick looked over her shoulder at Helena, hesitant. Claudia filled the silence.

            “Johann Maezel’s metronome. It brings back the dead, which is why it’s for Steve.”

            An argument was flaring up, but Helena sliced right through it, insisting, “That’s not possible! Maezel’s metronome is a myth, Caturanga told me that…”

            Everyone was staring at her except Mrs. Frederick, who was staring at the floor. There was dust ground into the seams between the floorboards. Pete and Leena retreated to the kitchen as the moment stretched past bearing; Helena could hear them whispering to each other as they went.

            She had sought out the metronome immediately, after Christina’s murder. It was her second wave of fury, after Caturanga had told her there was no such thing as resurrection, which had fueled her torture of the thieves who had killed her daughter.

            _How could there be resurrection?_ Caturanga had asked her. _If it could be done, everyone would do it. There are a thousand others in the world as desperate for such things as you._

            She’d made great progress on it. She’d found the name of Johann Maezel, calculated the means of life restoration, a transfer of living energy to the dead, based on healing of mortal wounds. She’d calculated, too, that what it would take to revive Christina, by then almost a month dead, was more than Helena had in her own body. None of that had mattered; only the hope, the possibility.

            Now here it was, the metronome, as useless to her as it always had been.

            “You know how it works?” Claudia asked her.

            “No,” Helena said. “I know the mathematics, the logic behind it. I know what it might take, but I don’t know nearly enough. For a start, I don’t know what the consequences might be.”

            Artie started to warn about that issue, gruff and stern, but Claudia rounded on him, on both of them.

            “And what are the consequences of Steve being dead? Seems like a pretty obvious disaster to me.”

            “It is, it’s a tragedy,” Helena told her, because Mrs. Frederick was silent and Artie was stunned. “But Claudia, darling, rushing into things blindly, especially with artifacts involved, might only make things worse.”

            Claudia was so stiff her shoulders trembled. She sniffed harshly, refusing to cry, and Helena came gingerly forward to kneel in front of her chair.

            “There’s nothing worse than this,” Claudia said.

            Helena ran a hand through Claudia’s hair, crooning, “It feels that way, I know. When I lost my Christina, I…”

            But Claudia shook her head and pushed Helena away.

            “This isn’t about _Christina_ , it’s about _Steve_.”

            “Claudia, please listen to me, just for a moment.”

            “No!” Claudia was on her feet now, full-on shouting. “You listen. I am not going to give up on my best friend just because you let your daughter die!”

            Helena surged to her feet, roaring, “I did not _let_ my daughter die! I did everything I could to save her, and it destroyed me, Claudia. All I can possibly do is try to save you from that fate!”

            “You just think you know everything, but you don’t get it! I have the answer.” Claudia held the metronome up, nearly hit Helena with it waving it in her face. “All I have to do is use it, and if you don’t want to help me, fine. Fuck off and get out of my way!”

            Claudia shoved past Helena, knocking her painfully onto her twisted ankle, and it delayed her long enough that Claudia had slammed her bedroom door by the time Helena mounted the steps. Helena stood paralyzed, listening to the banging above her, the sudden blast of rock and roll that poured downstairs like a force field around Claudia’s room.

            Mrs. Frederick had the gall to try to speak to her.

            “It would have killed you.”

            The metronome, she meant. Helena bristled.

            “It would have been my death to die.”

            “You were like a daughter to him, Helena.”

            This much Helena had known. When the Regents had marched her to the bronzer, Caturanga had caught hold of anyone within arm’s reach, begging them not to take her.

            _Please,_ he’d told them, _please, she’s like my child!_

            It had reminded her of the last moments with her own child, of those two agonizing trips in her time machine, sitting on the floor of that house in Paris, her broken daughter in her arms. It had made her long more keenly for the oblivion of bronze. Little had she known.

            Mrs. Frederick continued, “Would you not have lied to Christina to save her life?”

            “I’d do anything to save her life!” Helena spat, and the memory of all she had done, all that Mrs. Frederick knew, sent her spiraling into a rage of purpose. “Does that make it right? If it’s so forgivable, what we do to save our children, our loved ones, then let Claudia have the metronome!”

            “We cannot allow that.”

            “But you can allow that boy to die? You can leave me alone and allow me to watch him die? Dear god, it’s little wonder why a person a year tries to bloody kill you all! You make your own monsters.”

            “It is, at times, a consequence of our work,” Mrs. Frederick admitted. “But you must consider the consequences of what you are asking us to do. If Claudia uses the metronome…”

            “I don’t care! I don’t care!” Helena howled, and she pounded the wall and kicked the banister until she nearly broke something, until her body couldn’t stand the beating anymore. Hands in her hair, she bowed her head and breathed. She could feel everyone watching her, and she refused to look up until she could look them in the eye.

            “Forgive me,” she finally whispered. “I’ve lost my senses.”

            “That’s understandable, you’ve had an ordeal,” Mrs. Frederick said.

            And so Helena pushed her luck.

            “My point, however, remains sound. There is always a way, at least at first. Please think about your options before they fade.”

            Myka tiptoed toward her, then, offering, “Brandy and a hot bath?”

            Helena nodded and let Myka guide her up the stairs.

           

 

            “I grabbed your overnight bag from your car, so you have clean clothes and your meds.”

            Helena was reclining in the tub, all but her head and shoulders hidden behind the shower curtain. She let her head loll in Myka’s direction and smiled a little.

            “Heaven bless you,” she murmured.

            “Is there anything else you need? Tea, more brandy… anything?”

            The gentle smile faded, and Helena’s face was as concerned as it was exhausted, which was saying something.

            “Perhaps you should just slow down a bit, Myka.”

            But Myka wasn’t ready to slow down. If she slowed down, she’d come to a horrible shuddering stop and have a breakdown, and Helena might need something, or Claudia, and she just couldn’t… couldn’t deal. Not yet.

            Helena pulled a hand out of the water and reached for her, fingertips grazing Myka’s knee. God, it would be so easy to have that breakdown right here on the bathmat.

            “I’m gonna go help Leena with dinner,” Myka said, pulling away from Helena’s touch. “Let me know if you need anything.”

            Helena sighed and slid deeper into the water. When Myka glanced back before shutting the door, she had the heels of her hands pressed into her eyes.

            Myka left Helena’s bag beside the bathroom door, along with her own bathrobe and slippers and an ace bandage for Helena’s ankle. Keeping warm, she suggested on a sticky note, would help with the aches and pains. When she’d finished fussing over that, she went down to the kitchen and asked Leena what the menu was.

            “I had some chili in the freezer, so I’m reheating that, and there’s fresh bread and cookies.”

            Pete displayed the cookie he was eating as an example.

            “Extra onions for Claudia’s chili?” Myka suggested.

            Leena nodded. “Good idea. I’ll get to it.”

            “It’s okay, I got it.”

            “Mykes,” Pete said while she pulled out a knife and cutting board.

            “Where’s Artie?” Myka asked.

            “At the Warehouse. I think he wanted to be alone. Myka, listen.”

            Myka breezed past him toward the fridge, muttering, “That makes sense,” while she crouched to reach the crisper drawer.

            Pete knelt next to her and took the onion out of her hands.

            “Myka, stop,” he said. “It’s over, okay? There’s nothing else to do.”

            He was almost crying, like he was waiting for her to start.

            “Steve is dead.”

            It was all she could think, now that she was letting herself think about it. Pete pulled her to him, and they both lost it, on the floor of the kitchen, in front of the open fridge. Eventually, Leena coaxed Pete into shuffling them both onto the living room couch. After about half an hour, they hit the awkward, too-exhausted-to-cry, laughing part of the grief, and they seemed almost normal by the time Helena wandered back downstairs, swaddled in Myka’s bright yellow bathrobe and fuzzy slippers that, honestly, made her look like she had cats tied to her feet. Pete and Myka couldn’t stop sniggering.

            “Fancy footwear, HG!” Pete said.

            Helena leaned against the doorframe, eyebrow raised, and said directly to Myka, “So happy to provide the evening’s entertainment.”

            “I’m sorry, I just,” Myka said through her giggles, and out of nowhere she was crying again. “I’m just so glad he didn’t take you, too.”

            Her eyes were too blurry to see Helena’s expression, but she could see her moving forward, and Myka held her arms out. She buried her face in Helena’s shoulder, and her hair was still wet, but so was Myka’s face, so what difference did it make?

            Gently, Helena arranged them so she was sitting on the couch with Myka curled into her side. Her voice was soothing, and she rubbed Myka’s arm and back and petted her hair until Myka was calm enough to lift her head.

            “What do you need?” Helena asked, wiping Myka’s cheeks.

            “To stop crying,” Myka grumbled, and she tried to unfold herself without losing too much contact with Helena. The fact that Helena made no move to take her arm away from Myka’ shoulders helped. “There has to be a limit to how much a person cries in the span of a few hours.”

            Helena fished in the bathrobe pocket and pulled out a bottle of advil.

            “Wanted a glass of water to take these with. Might help with the impending headache,” she said and poured Myka two.

            Pete traded Myka the advil for the water glass, which Helena had abandoned on the end table when the crying had begun. While she was downing the medicine, she felt Helena shift to press her fingers to Pete’s shoulder, murmuring, “How are you?” To which he gave her a thumbs-up while dry swallowing.

            Myka took another swig from the glass and handed it to Helena, who sipped it and set it aside.

  
            “Ew!”

            Myka glared at Pete. He was still making a face at them.

            “What? It’s not like she has cooties!”

            “I don’t think I was checked for that, actually,” Helena winced.

            “No, Helena, it’s just slang. Like, boys are gross, so you say they have cooties.”

            Helena made a face that, while it didn’t always mean she understood, indicated that you didn’t have to explain anymore. Pete was still being obnoxious.

            “I’m not talking about cooties, man, I’m talking about actual germs! Drinking after people is gross.”

            “All the garbage you eat, and you think _drinking after people_ is gross? Seriously?”

            “Leena!” Pete called, because she was passing through with the pot of chili. “Back me up here: drinking out of the same glass is disgusting, right?”

            Leena paused and gave Myka, then Helena, a searching look. Then she smiled and said, “Dinner’s ready.”

            In the instant before Helena got up, Myka realized that she’d been absently playing with the ends of Myka’s hair.

            “HG, I’ll get a room set up for you right after dinner so it’ll be ready when you want to get some sleep,” Leena was saying, but Myka waved the suggestion away.

            “Don’t bother,” she said, taking the seat next to Helena at the table. “She can just stay with me.”

            Myka couldn’t read Helena’s reaction to that idea, but there certainly wasn’t any protest.

            They ate in silence. Helena picked at her food and listened to the noises still drifting downstairs from Claudia’s room. She seemed to notice Myka’s small portions, too, and she spread butter on bread, then dusted it with sugar from the bowl meant for coffee and tea. When it was offered to her, Myka ate it eagerly. Helena did the same for the bread reserved for Claudia, heaped extra onions into a bowl of chili, and carried it upstairs. They could all hear her calling the girl’s name plaintively over the barrage of music.

            “You guys okay?” Pete asked Myka and Leena. When they nodded, he said, “I need a meeting, so I’m gonna hit the one in Featherhead. Might stay for two, actually. That kind of day.”

            He stood before Myka could put a hand on his arm, but he tried to give her a smile before he left.

            “Drive safe,” she told him.

            Leena cleared the table, and Myka didn’t try to help. She couldn’t anymore. She just sat at the table, staring out the window and waiting for Helena to come back.

            “I left the food by Claudia’s door,” Helena said when she came back into the room. “I’m going to help Leena with dishes.”

            Myka nodded. “I need a shower. You want to go to bed after that?”

            It was only seven o’clock, but Helena agreed.

            When Myka came out of the bathroom, the bowl and plate outside of Claudia’s door were empty.

            _She’ll be fine,_ Myka told herself, and she brought the dishes downstairs to the kitchen.

            Leena was working on embroidery, and Helena was rambling about the sights to see in downtown Atlanta. She trailed off midsentence when she saw Myka, bid Leena the most vague good night that was still courteous, and shambled upstairs.

            “I’m so sorry,” she mumbled when she came back from changing into pajamas. “About earlier, I mean. I should have been there for you, but instead I was behaving like my troubles, ancient troubles no less, were…”

            “Okay, first of all,” Myka said, “I think you know better than that. Second of all, as the crying disaster should have indicated, I’m pretty grateful you’re here at all. You don’t have to be doing something for me every minute for that to be true.”

            Myka pulled the extra pillows off her bed and tugged the sheets down.

            “Third of all,” she continued, “you should probably sleep on your left side so your ankle’s elevated.”

            Helena gave her a drowsy salute and crawled into the bed. To her credit, Myka only fussed for a minute before she settled in herself, pulling Helena’s hand possessively close to her without a second thought.

           

 

            When Myka woke up, she was the little spoon, and Helena was snoring lightly into her hair. She stirred, though, when Myka stretched her legs. There was some bleary shuffling and snuffling, during which her hand brushed Myka’s breast (and Myka didn’t know a person could die of complicated feelings this early in the morning), and then Helena obviously realized where she was and what was happening. She moved her entire body away, lifting the arm around Myka’s waist.

            “Got a bit cozy, did I? My apologies.”

            “It was me,” Myka said. She turned over on her back so she could see Helena’s sleepy face (and really, these feelings weren’t all that complicated after all). “You haven’t moved an inch, I just rolled into you.”

            While she was talking, she settled Helena’s arm back across her. Their faces were close together, and they probably both had morning breath, because they’d slept for ten hours, but whatever. Helena didn’t seem to mind. She toyed with Myka’s fingers in a way that seemed unconscious. At least, there was plausible deniability, so Myka tried not to take it too seriously. For a while, they just talked, and Myka got to listen to how Helena’s voice smoothed out and deepened with use. She was narrating her fantastical dreams, and Myka was pretty sure she was making at least half of it up, because no one remembered dreams this vividly.

            And then Pete banged on the door, flung it open, and yelled, “Guys, get up! Claudia’s gone.”

            “Shit,” Helena growled. She’d jumped upright, one foot on the floor, when the banging started. Now she was on her feet and…

            Half naked. She’d ripped her nightshirt off without hesitation, and Myka hadn’t looked away fast enough to miss the view. Now, though, her eyes were glued to the opposite wall. She could hear Helena rifling through her bag, probably digging for a clean bra and shirt.

            “Whoa,” Pete griped, “Public indecency, HG!”

            “Then get out!” Helena yelled back, and Myka saw the nightshirt fly across the room out of the corner of her eye. She almost started laughing.

            But Helena was muttering to herself about where Claudia might have gone and how far ahead of them she was, and things weren’t as funny as they could have been. Myka dressed as fast as she could, which wasn’t half as fast as Helena (who had probably needed to get away quickly more than once, for a lot of reasons that Myka tried not to think about), and the two of them barreled down the stairs.

            Artie wasn’t there, and the energy evaporated with nothing to pour into. Myka slumped into a chair at the table, across from Pete. Helena massaged her hand and paced. Why Claudia was gone, that Steve was _gone_ , brought a dull ache to Myka’s throat, like the pointlessness of everything was strangling her. Even when Artie appeared, and they all pounced on him, the urgency was muffled. It was hard to get traction. Artie’s opacity made it worse.

            “What’s the plan?” Pete asked.

            “Plan?”

            “Yeah, the plan to help Claudia,” Myka said.

            “What other plan would there be?” Pete looked at Artie like he’d left his brain at the Warehouse. “So we know where she went and we know what she’s after. Okay, technically ‘we’ don’t know, but I bet you do!”

            Helena offered, “I was held in an underground facility in Massachusetts. The Regents may have a morgue there as well.”

            “Massachusetts, okay, here we go!” Pete declared, but Artie put up a hand to stop him.

            “We are not helping Claudia,” Artie announced, and all three of them started shouting at him at once. He had to bellow over them, “No, _we_ are not doing anything. _I_ will find Claudia. The two of you will be in Philadelphia.”

            Pete scoffed, “No, no, no,” and Myka wanted to know what the hell they were supposed to do in Philadelphia.

            “We got a ping!” Artie yelled.

            He presented them with a gadget that diverted their attention completely. Myka had never seen it before. Pete snatched it right out of Artie’s hand to have a look.

            “What is that?” Myka asked.

            “It’s cool is what it is,” Pete told her.

            “Is that the pocket ping device?” Helena asked. She took it from Pete and didn’t even roll her eyes when he whined, so intent was she on studying the little gizmo. “What clever execution. Claudia and I discussed some of the…”

            Artie ripped it away from her and snapped it shut, growling, “Yes, yes, it’s the pocket ping device. Claudia made it _for me_!”

            “Well there you go, Artie!” Pete declared.

            Myka pointed to the device as it disappeared into Artie’s jacket pocket. “That’s another reason why we need to find Claudia.”

            “Listen!” Artie barked. “A mob in Philadelphia almost killed a young man. They claimed that they were being attacked by some… thing. Unless you want it to happen again, you will get there. Yesterday!”

            He thrust two files and plane tickets at them. Myka looked at the departure time: if they didn’t leave in twenty minutes, they might miss the flight.

            “Yesterday?” Pete grumbled. “What, are we supposed to turn back time?”

            Artie glared. “If that’s what it takes to get you there! And speaking of time travel,” he turned to Helena and presented her with a plane ticket to match Pete and Myka’s. “This is your ticket back to Atlanta. The Thorndikes will pick you up and take you home, and…”

            “Absolutely not,” Helena told him. “I’m going with you.”

            Myka held her breath while the two of them stared each other down. Artie pointed to the stairs, and Pete ran for it, but Myka stood her ground. No way in hell was she leaving Helena alone with Artie, especially when they were both in a bad mood. Artie broke his death lock with Helena to scowl at her, but Myka sat back down at the table, and Artie huffed in surrender.

            “I can help you, Artie,” Helena said. “I know Claudia, and I know what she’s going through. My insight could…”

            “Yes, your insight, of course! Because you’re the only person who’s ever had someone die, you’re so special and magical!”

            Helena’s arms were crossed, and she bristled at Artie’s mocking. Myka winced.

            “I mean her impulse to abuse artifacts for resurrection, the need to control something for once, to have that power.”

            Artie raised an eyebrow at her and said, “Big power, isn’t it? Huge power, and it’s always tempting. Tell me, Helena, how does it feel to have that kind of power sitting right here, right here! At this table, and you can’t reach it?”

            Myka saw Helena glance at the spot on the table where Artie was pointing. About five inches from where the metronome had actually been, she noted absently, but the idea was there. Pretty sound idea, too. Last night had been so hard on Helena.

            “The metronome is useless to me, if you’re implying that I would steal it,” Helena told him.

            “No, I’m implying that you were a wreck last night, and nothing you said made any difference _at all_ to Claudia. You want to help her, but you can’t. _I_ can help Claudia, but not if I have to worry about you falling off the wagon because you want to cheat death so badly, or Claudia triggers you, or you get claustrophobic and have a panic attack in the elevator!”

            Helena argued, Artie refused to stop, and they both raised their voices to be heard over one another. Myka wasn’t listening to either of them.

            Helena had had a panic attack in an elevator, once, when she and Myka had been alone. Myka had kept the secret (trusting Helena’s insistence that she’d simply never been in one before, that she would be fine), and the only person she could imagine Helena telling that story to was Harper Thorndike. Which meant there was only one way for Artie to know about it: Atlas 66.

            “You’ve been alone in the field for a long time now,” Artie was saying to Helena, at a reasonable volume for once. “If you’re going to come back here as an agent, that makes me your boss, and I need you to trust me and respect my decisions. You’re on a team, now, Wells, and if you can’t…”

            “Is it your passion for teamwork that drives you to pursue Claudia alone?” Helena shot back, and Myka had to block them out as the volume escalated again.

            Artie and Claudia had decrypted the last of the Atlas 66 file together the day before, and printed everything out in case there was something in it that could help them. Myka had sorted through and sifted out the therapy session notes and transcripts.

            _“Her life is at stake, and you’re protecting her privacy?”_ Artie had railed. _“We might need this information!”_

_“And if we do, it will all be right here. But we’ve already questioned Dr. Thorndike, and he says there’s nothing significant, just personal history. It’s none of our business, Artie, so yes, I’m protecting it.”_

            But then she’d left it all right there on the table. She should have put it through the shredder.

            Helena and Artie weren’t finished fighting (might never be), but Myka interrupted them.

            “You read her file.”

            Both of them turned to her, staring like they’d forgotten she was there.

            “Artie, how the hell could you do that? Standing there lecturing her about trust and respect, and you can’t even respect her privacy by not reading encrypted files that were confidential in the first place!”

            Helena mouthed a silent, “oh,” and Artie looked embarrassed and confused.

            “I needed to know if I could trust her,” he claimed. “And why are you even—“

            “You saw what she did for us yesterday! She’s a hero, Artie, and—“

            “Let’s not exaggerate, darling.”

            “— bringing this up right now when I need to be going after Claudia and you have a _job_ to do! Why does no one here do what they’re told to—“

            “Us, what about you? I told you not to—“

            “That’s quite enough, thank you!” Helena snapped.

            The room went quiet, and Myka watched Helena study her and Artie in turn before she continued.

            “Now, the matter stands so: I wish to help you, Artie, because Claudia is quite dear to me. You feel, however, that such participation would be unwise. Whether such sensitivity is born of good sense or of the information you ought not have been privy to is a separate issue. We must get this sorted immediately, as we all have pressing issues we must attend to. Agreed?”

            Myka nodded dumbly, and Artie did the same.

            “A proposal. Since the information which Myka has divulged makes me reluctant to remain in your company, Artie, I will agree to return to my family in Atlanta. In exchange, you will keep me consistently informed of all developments regarding Claudia, and if either of us decides that it would be best for me to intervene, you will provide me transport and respect my efforts. A fair idea?”

            “Yeah,” Artie mumbled. “Seems… reasonable.”

            “What about the file? Shouldn’t you two talk about that?” Myka asked.

            Helena shrugged and gave Artie a look that was dangerously amused.

            “I think perhaps the subject of patient confidentiality would best be discussed with a professional. Perhaps Dr. Calder would be willing to explain its significance to you?”

            Artie gulped. Helena turned to Myka and gestured upstairs.

            “No more dawdling, now. Philadelphia waits!”

            Helena slipped her plane ticket out of Artie’s hand and strode away. Myka followed her back to the bedroom, where Helena gathered her scattered nightclothes into a bag and zipped it before turning breezily.

            “Would you like help in packing? I imagine we’re cutting that flight of yours a bit close.”

            Myka shifted awkwardly in the doorframe.

            “Don’t you want to talk to Artie about the file thing? I mean, not now, but, later, or… I mean, it’s not good for you to stay mad.”

            Helena yanked a drawer open (thank god, not her underwear drawer) and held up one of Myka’s shirts for appraisal.

            “I’m not mad,” Helena said. “I’m uncomfortable and ashamed, which will fade in its own time. The anger you’re worried about is yours. Do you want the green or the blue shirt?”

            Myka blinked, then dug her suitcase out from under the bed, calling back, “Just throw them both in, it’s fine.”

            “Ay ay.”

            Helena literally threw the shirts at the suitcase, and Myka sat on the floor folding them.

            “Come to think of it,” Helena said suddenly, while she held up a jacket from the closet for Myka’s approval, “can I have a moment to talk with you?”

            Myka put out her hand to catch the jacket and nodded. Helena continued rooting through her dresser and closet, picking and choosing and letting Myka arrange from her place on the floor.

            “I wish you wouldn’t start fights with Artie on my behalf. You want to defend me, I understand, but I’d much rather be as unobtrusive as possible and earn my own keep. Direct confrontation tends only to highlight how undesirable I am, and why, none of which is actually easy to argue aloud. Not to mention the fact that while such arguments begin with me, there seems to be another element to them in the end. You both take it so personally, and it puts me in a place of feeling like I’ve started something, so I have to stop it, even when I can’t. Trousers?”

            “Yeah, please. I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. It’s just… What can I do when Artie treats you like that?”

            Helena came out of the closet with two pairs of slacks over her arm, and she knelt in front of Myka to present them for packing. Myka held them in her lap while Helena answered.

            “Trust me? One remarkable skill I honed in my months of therapy is that when I need help, I ask for it. I know you’re there for me, Myka. Most of the time, that’s all I need.”

            She smiled, and Myka felt her heart swell until the seams pulled.

            “God, I—“

            _Love you._

“You’re amazing,” Myka revised.

            Helena scoffed, and Myka got embarrassed and fled to the bathroom to get the rest of her stuff. Pete was in the hall, tapping his foot and making a show of being the one who had to wait.

            “Chop chop, Mykes!” he teased. “You can have girl talk with your bestie any time now.”

            _Oh right,_ Myka flinched. _That._

            And it started caving in on her again: Pete was mad at her, Steve was dead, Claudia was gone, and Helena was leaving again. Myka snatched her toiletries and dashed back to her room like the house was going to collapse if she didn’t, because if she wasn’t doing something, right now, she was going to collapse.

            Helena held out a cell phone when Myka reappeared, and she raised an eyebrow at the sudden entrance but deigned not to comment.

            “Is this your phone number?” she asked instead.

            Myka glanced at the screen and nodded.

            “Aces, I remembered!” Helena cheered, and she started clicking away at the cell phone’s keypad like she’d been doing it all her life. “I’m texting you so you’ll have mine. Do call me when your mission’s over? Never mind the time. I’ll be grateful at any hour to know you’re safe and successful.”

            On the table beside the door, Myka’s cell phone buzzed. Helena made a satisfied sound, tucked her phone into her pocket, and headed out the door with her little bag, telling Myka to hurry along. But Myka paused long enough to read the message Helena had sent her (and to wonder whether Helena’s quick exit was due to a kind of shyness that was so rare in her).

            The message was brief: _We’ll get it sorted._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some dialogue from "An Evil Within," by Constantine Makris.
> 
> Title is from a passage about metronomes in James Brown III's The Amateur String Quartet.


	17. Finally and Completely

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for reading this; I've really loved working on it. 
> 
> Thank you also to my amazing editors, Sunshine18 and deathtodickens. Both of them took a lot of time to help me with questions, revisions, and my almost endless nitpicking. This piece would never have been what it is without them. 
> 
> So. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

            Myka could feel everyone taking turns staring at her, curled loosely into a chair, reading one of the H. G. Wells books that was actually written by Charles alone, after Helena was gone. It was like they were waiting for her to fidget, complain, do a back flip, anything; like they couldn’t stand the fact that she was just… waiting.

            What they didn’t know was that Myka was listening, to everything from the wind in the trees outside to the tick of her watch. It was five minutes after ten. Any minute now.

            Steve was sitting on the couch, regaling Claudia with the tale of how hard and gloriously HG had kicked his ass in Minnesota (again), Leena was painting in the sunroom, and Pete was running back and forth between friendly flirting with her and chiming in about all the moves he would have done that would totally have been as awesome as HG’s. He’d given up trying to pull more than monosyllables out of Myka about ten minutes ago, as the hour approached and the tense anticipation escalated.

            And then she heard it: tires on the driveway.

            She was unfolded and flying like an arrow to the front door, exhaling, “Helena,” before anyone else in the house could move.

            Dr. Calder had flown out with her, to see Artie and keep him happy during the adjustment. Helena was pulling her suitcases out of the back of the car, which Vanessa had left running, and the smooth friendliness with which they interacted was fascinating. Vanessa was the first of them to see Myka leaning against the doorframe, watching them. Helena stood, one duffel hanging at her side, gazing back. Myka could feel her breathing change, admired how her heart slowly accelerated in anticipation; she was going to walk down the steps into the driveway, pull Helena into her arms, and she would be here, home at last, for good.

            And then Helena tensed, shouting, “Myka, look out!” just barely in time to save her from the speeding bullet that was Claudia.

            “HG!” Claudia screamed, holding out the G until impact. Her hug was so aggressive that Helena stumbled backward against the car.

            _So much for my plan_ , Myka thought, and she walked off the porch shaking her head. She hugged Vanessa and thanked her over the squealing.

            “I honestly didn’t do much to be thanked for,” Vanessa said. “Harper’s the one who pulled her through.”

            Myka nodded and asked, “Right. So, if he were to receive a gift basket a month for the rest of his life, what would he like in that?”

            Vanessa laughed. Claudia was dragging Helena toward the front door, so Myka picked up her other bag, slung it over her shoulder, and followed, waving goodbye to Vanessa as she went.

            Pete lifted Helena off her feet hugging her, and the poor woman looked relieved to endure only gentle affection from Leena.

            “And this is Steve!” Claudia declared, presenting him with jazz hands.

            “Steve Jinks,” Steve said, shaking Helena’s hand. “Sorry about that first impression.”

            Helena hummed in amusement and asked, “How are your ribs?”

            Steve laughed.

            “A pleasure to meet you,” Helena told him, and Myka saw her opening.

            Fingers light on Helena’s shoulder, she offered to take her to her new room, then guided her toward the stairs. The door had its key hanging from the lock, and Helena turned it and opened the door wide. She and Myka both dropped the bags they’d carried on the floor.

            Helena took a moment to look around the room, her back to Myka, before she took a deep breath and turned. She whispered her name, and Myka tripped over one of the duffel bags reaching to hug her.

            “Welcome home,” she whispered into Helena’s shoulder when the woman caught her.

           

 

            “Leave them alone,” Leena warned Claudia before she went to the kitchen to put a kettle on. “You’ve already ruined one moment.”

            Claudia whined, but she held her place at the bottom of the steps instead of charging upstairs like she wanted to. Steve and Pete joined her.

            “Yeah, Claude,” Pete grumbled, “It’s girly sleepover time, and only best friends are invited.”

            “Did you think they’d invite you, dude?” Claudia asked.

            Pete sighed, “There was a time…”

            “I don’t think there was ever a time when Myka would invite you to a three-way. And while you did have HG’s tongue in your throat in like three minutes flat, I get the feeling it’s not quite the same.”

            Pete looked shocked, and clearly something was going wrong somewhere. Claudia looked to Steve for guidance, but he was staring blankly up the stairs. Also weird, but a weird that could be dealt with later, because Pete was sputtering about stuff like “Do girls really have sex at sleep-overs? Because man, no wonder girls like to have so many friends,” and “Is that why girls take other girls to the bathroom with them?” Oh god, he had to be stopped.

            “First of all, having had no friends of my own, like, ever before now, I cannot attest to any of the bizarre crap you’re asking me about. More importantly, though, dude. Friends?”

            “Yeah, HG and Myka, BFF’s!”

            Even Steve was paying attention now, if vaguely. Claudia shook her head and pointed up the stairs.

            “That’s not friendship, man. That’s soul mate shit.”

            “What?” Pete said. “No. Myka? No, no.”

            Claudia gaped at him a minute while he protested, then said, “Okay, stop and think about it. We’re Myka’s friends. Does she do wild and wacky rule-breaker stuff for us?”

            “… No.”

            “No. So doesn’t everything Myka’s done for HG make more sense if there’s tingly feelings involved? Really think about it. Compare and contrast, bro.”

            For a long minute, Pete just stood there. And then he cocked his head and said, “Huh.”

            That was it. Myka came down the stairs, grinning like she was trying to light the world with her face, and Pete grabbed her and pulled her aside. That may or may not be going well, Claudia thought, but Myka could handle herself. She turned her attention instead to Steve.

            “So what’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

            Steve glanced up the stairs again, then toward the whispers of Pete and Myka in the living room, before he said, “She lied.”

            Claudia looked around, confused, like clearly someone else had just entered the house. Because no way was he talking about…

            “HG?”

            “She said it was a pleasure to meet me,” Steve explained, “but she was lying.”

 

 

            Helena managed to not look disappointed when the knock on her door the next evening was not Myka.

            The first night back had been, frankly, overwhelming. She announced not long after dinner that she intended to retire, and had settled into the armchair in her room to read. Myka had found her there a few hours later.

            “I thought you were going to sleep,” she’d said, worried, Helena guessed, that sleep had not come.

            “No,” Helena had corrected, “I said I was going to retire. I needed a bit of a break from people.”

            Myka had ducked her head and started to back out, and Helena had stopped her. Perhaps too vehemently, but Helena didn’t care.

            “I didn’t mean you. Honestly, unless it’s something flattering, I never mean you.”

            And Myka had stood, leaning against the doorframe, grinning. She seemed to wait for something else to be said. Helena got nervous, uncertain but longing.

            “Would you like to sit and read with me a while?” she’d offered eventually, and they’d had such a peaceful evening together. Helena had hoped she would come again.

            Instead, Steve Jinks stood chewing air like a skittish horse. Helena smirked at him and left him hanging in her doorway.

          

 

            “Hi. I was um…”

            Steve floundered, staring around the room instead of into the eyes the woman who was raising an eyebrow at him. Four-poster bed, blue sheets half-falling onto the floor. Big desk, big bookshelf, and two green leather armchairs arranged around a claw-footed table. HG Wells in one of them, waiting.

            “Yes?”

            “I wanted to. No, that’s a lie, I didn’t want to, but Claudia said I should talk to you.”

            “What about, dear boy?”

            Steve considered, then replied, “You know I can tell when people are lying.”

            HG Wells did not react like he’d expected her to. She tensed, like his mom used to do when the new house made weird noises in the evenings; like if she listened hard enough, she could distinguish a squirrel in the attic from a robber on the second floor and know how to defend herself.

            “And you detected a falsehood in me? Because I assure you, my…”

            “No, no!” Steve interrupted. God, this was not going well. Of course she’d be defensive, she’d been defending herself night and day for a year and half. “It’s not like that.”

            HG relaxed, just the slightest bit, in her chair. Steve started over.

            “It’s not you, it’s me,” Steve tried, then rolled his eyes and muttered, “This sounds like my last breakup.”

            At that, HG laughed. She went back to being languid and interested, and she smirked at him again. And if his being completely incompetent made her feel better, you know what? That was fine.

            “Sit,” she told him firmly, gesturing to the chair across from her. “Speak.”

            Steve obeyed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

            “I get that I didn’t make the best first impression. And I want to be sure we take care of that. So how can I make it up to you?”

            “Your information saved my life, Agent Jinks, and you sacrificed yours to deliver it. Your faithfulness is beyond all reproach, and certainly beyond mine.”

            “But you weren’t happy to see me.”

            HG tried to protest, but Steve held up a hand, insisting, “I know you weren’t. You looked me right in the eye when you said it. And I don’t blame you. I just want to know why.”

            She took her time in answering.

            “Were you informed of the incident regarding the metronome?”

            “You mean the knock-down drag-out screaming match you had with Claud and Mrs. Frederick? Yeah, I was informed.” Steve paused, then asked, “She did apologize to you for that, right? Claudia?”

            “Of course. Practically right away,” HG assured him. Truth.

            “But you don’t think she should have used the metronome,” Steve concluded.

            HG shifted forward in her chair and made sure he was looking her in the eye before she told him, “That would be the equivalent of wishing you dead, and I would do no such thing.”

            Steve held her gaze and nodded. Truth.

            “The trouble I’ve had is really nothing to do with your being alive,” she continued. “It’s only that there are so many people who aren’t and ought to be. My child, Myka’s lover, Pete’s father, Claudia’s parents. I looked at you, and I just…”

            But HG didn’t seem able to look at him, not now. She swung her gaze to the window beside her, pressed her knuckles to her lips and screwed her eyes shut. It brought out the worry lines in her face.

            “I just still don’t understand why people die.”

            Steve sat still, tried to bring calm and peace into the room before one or both of them lost it. HG obviously didn’t want to do that in front of him, and he wasn’t a fan of the waterworks himself.

            So it was kind of surprising when HG mopped at her eyes without trying to hide it, before she turned to him again.

            “I’m grateful that you’re here, Agent Jinks, and grateful in the end that it was you. Claudia wouldn’t have born it, you see. She’d have spent the rest of her days hating Sykes, hating the Regents, hating anything and everything that wasn’t _you._ But you’re here now. And when the next death comes, as it must, you’ll be there for her.”

            The intensity of HG’s stare made Steve turn his eyes to the carpet. Nothing about this woman wavered, and it was like she was trying to do more than tell the truth. She was trying to drill it into him with her eyes, with the quivering tension of her jaw and the down-turned corner of her lips.

            There was a difference, and sometimes Steve could see it, between what a person believed to be true, and what they were absolutely sure of.

            HG Wells was absolutely sure, with the conviction of a scientist and a fire-and-brimstone preacher combined. And Steve believed her.

           

 

            Helena breathed herself calm and glanced at the tea set she’d arranged on the little end table: kettle and sugar and two sweet china cups (for she had so hoped that Myka would join her, but this was just as important).

            “I’m told you have an interest in herbal teas,” Helena said. “Shame on a perfectly good stereotype, but I don’t understand them at all. Would black serve you for the moment?”

            Steve took the cup she offered, though he didn’t drink much of it, and volunteered to teach her all about herbal if she were ever interested. Helena told him it would be a pleasure.

 

 

            Myka did come, an hour later, and saw through Helena’s open door that she and Steve were deep in conversation about… chamomile, for some reason. She let herself watch them while she debated whether or not watching them without announcing herself was rude or creepy. Helena grinned at Steve, and Myka decided to content herself with that and go to bed. She came every night to Helena’s door, and while most days the chair was waiting for her, one time she found Steve wafting a new aroma toward Helena’s nose, and later that week, Claudia had spread schematics and haphazard parts across the bedroom floor. Myka was fine with that.

 

 

            Helena was in the shower now, which gave Myka plenty of time to sit on the couch in the sunroom drinking tea and watching the rain.

            The disaster of Walter Sykes was more than two weeks past, and everything at the Warehouse was settled back into its natural stride. Steve had been back since the day after the bomb. Helena had come home six days ago.

            Myka had worried about the transition Helena was making, from being alone for months, to surrounded by family for a week, to field work at the Warehouse and communal living at the B&B. Wasted worry, it turned out, because Helena struck the balance elegantly between solitude and solidarity.

            _I told you so,_ she could hear Pete nagging.

            It had been a constant debate between them, ever since his turn-around on the topic of HG Wells (which had happened so fast Myka was almost ready to test him for signs of artifact influence). Pete, as self-proclaimed wingman, wanted Myka to “make with the kissing” and gossip with him about it right away; Myka had been adamant that Helena needed time, space, and a chance to make her own moves.

            _But it’s you guys’ super cute lesbian reunion!_ Pete had whined on Helena’s first day back.

            _Okay, first of all, not lesbians. Second of all, this isn’t a fairy tale, Pete. We don’t have to tie the whole thing up with a perfectly timed little bow._

To which Pete had shaken his head and answered, _What’s not perfect? Steve’s here, she’s here, we’re getting an extra bathroom in this place, it’s all good. Slap that bow on there, Mykes!_

            Myka had refused, which, sadly, made Pete more annoying whenever Myka complained that all she wanted to do when Helena was within ten feet was kiss her.

            The pounding footsteps coming down the stairs now were definitely not Helena’s, and Myka wouldn’t even have turned around if she hadn’t been called to.

            “Hey Myka,” Claudia teased. “Didn’t make it back from your romantic stroll before the storm hit, huh?”

            All Myka did was glare.

            “We’re starting a second movie upstairs. You want to come?”

            “No, thank you,” Myka replied.

            Claudia taunted, “We have popcorn!”

            “What makes you think I can’t make popcorn for myself and eat it right here?”

            “And what happens if I lure HG away with popcorn?”

            Myka turned back to the window, sipped her tea, and said, “Don’t.”

 

 

            “So,” Claudia asked when she returned to Pete’s room with the fresh popcorn, “Does HG know there’s a conspiracy to convince Myka to kiss her?”

            “It’s not a conspiracy,” Steve said.

            “Aren’t you betting on the date?” Leena asked.

            “Clawyaroosin,” Pete mumbled around a mouthful of popcorn, and he rolled his eyes while the others despaired that Myka wasn’t around to translate. Eventually, he repeated: “Claudia’s loosing.”

            “Kiss by midnight or she owes me thirty bucks,” Steve said.

            “Myka threatened me if I tried to make HG watch the movie with us,” Claudia gloated.

            Steve cocked his head and asked, “Threatened you with what?”

            “It’s Myka. She doesn’t have to get specific to instill fear.”

            “Did they get wet while they were walking? I heard the rain start before I…”

            Leena didn’t finish her question. Claudia was rolling on the floor, and Steve was trying to save Pete from choking on popcorn.

 

 

            “What the hell’s going on up there?” Myka asked when Helena came downstairs. There was banging and chaos above them.

            Helena shrugged while she filled her teacup from the kettle Myka had heated.

            “The film is funny, I suppose. Did you want to watch it?”

            She leaned against the table casually (elegantly, enticingly). Myka shook her head and tried not to think about what she wanted to watch (Helena drinking tea, taking off her clothes, laughing, or doing just about anything). One step at a time.

            Because Myka had been waiting. Helena had asked her to come on a walk, on the first not-stifling summer day Univille had seen, and Myka had held her breath, waiting. Every time Helena had skirted that line, pressing fingertips to Myka’s elbow to point out a flower or a bird, opening her mouth to say something, letting her smile soften and her eyes wander over Myka’s face, she’d backed away. Removed her hand, averted her eyes, said something charming but inane in the general direction of her sandals.

            Helena didn’t expect to be wanted, Myka had realized, in that sort of flash that only happens in the shower or at three in the morning. Helena wouldn’t take what she didn’t think was there.

            “I was thinking,” Myka started, and her brain tried to fight her. What if she was wrong? What did Helena want from a relationship? Did Helena even do relationships? And how was Myka going to get these words out of her mouth, anyway, with Helena looking at her like that, so alert and curious and… “We still have some stuff we need to talk about.”

            Helena put her teacup on the table behind her, trying for a nonchalant sort of, “Oh?” But she crossed her arms across her chest.

            Myka stood up.

            “Yeah. Thing is though,” she said, as she reached out with one hand and touched Helena’s fingers, “I don’t really feel like talking right now.”

            When Helena’s hand relaxed, Myka guided her arms open and stepped a little closer before she looked Helena in the eyes.

            “Would that be okay?” she asked.

            “I trust you,” Helena whispered back.

            Myka settled Helena’s hands on her shoulders, her hands on Helena’s hips, and waited. It took Helena an instant more of searching, her fingers twitching on the fabric of Myka’s shirt, before she finally kissed her.

            _‘I trust you.’ With what?_ Myka couldn’t stop herself from wondering, even as Helena wrapped her arms around Myka’s neck and pulled her so close so eagerly that she had to catch her balance on the table. There were a list of options Myka could think of (good judgment, their friendship, her body, her feelings, her heart), and it was all so gloriously promising that Myka couldn’t stop smiling.

            Helena felt the grin and pulled away.

            “Enjoying yourself?” she teased.

            Myka kissed the corner of Helena’s smile, her jaw, her temple, and mumbled about just how very, very much she was enjoying herself. Helena ran her fingers through Myka’s hair and brought her back to the kiss.

            And another thing, Myka observed: this was so different from what they’d done before. Because they had kissed before, in a sort of friends with benefits, let’s-not-look-at-this-too-closely sort of way, and Helena had been so good at it, sensual and dominant, but also almost frantic. It had been like time was going to run out on them, and Helena had to snatch what she could before the buzzer sounded.

            Helena kissed and nuzzled her cheek. Myka squeezed her closer and remembered that of course, they had been running out of time. Their days had been numbered and few, and Helena had kissed her, before, like they were drowning.

            “Are you alright?” Helena asked her.

            “Yeah,” Myka said. “Just glad you’re here.”

            God, Helena’s eyes could be so bright when she smiled. When she _really_ smiled, and Myka realized that somewhere along the way she had learned the difference. Helena was really smiling now, so wide her crooked bottom teeth were showing.

            “I am, too.”

            Helena paused then, leaning back in Myka’s arms (because Myka hadn’t loosened her grip around Helena’s waist). Myka slid one arm up and pulled Helena back to her. They kissed again, and Myka could feel the difference. It was the gusto of the explorer, the unabashed, curious delight of the traveler who comes home to a whole new world. It was the kind of wonder that led a person to… to peel sticky notes off a pad just to affix them to various objects.

            It was Helena, finally and completely.

            Myka was in rapture, running her hands over Helena’s back and pressing her tongue against Helena’s lips just to try to get her closer. Helena stood on her tiptoes, probably with the same goal. She also sucked on Myka’s tongue. God, that was amazing.

            And Helena was still so, so good at this. She put a hand on Myka’s jaw and tilted her head back so she could kiss every available inch of the side of Myka’s neck, sighing and whimpering as she went.

            The kisses were so hard, the bite was probably unintentional. It happened, though, and Myka wanted to collapse on the floor. Instead, she managed to drag herself out of Helena’s arms.

            “Okay,” she spluttered, “I cannot be expected to stand up when you do that.”

            She lowered herself onto the couch behind her while Helena scoffed, then she tugged at Helena’s hands.

            “Come here and do it again?”

           

 

            Pete could eat horrifying amounts of popcorn. The fact wouldn’t bother Claudia, except that the bowl was already empty again, and the official rule of Pete’s room, which he had totally just made up, was that the closest person to the door had to pop the corn every time. Claudia thumped down the stairs, thinking she really picked the wrong seat.

            And then she glanced into the sunroom and darted silently back up the stairs.

            “Where’s the popcorn?” Pete whined when she ran through his bedroom door, but she ignored him, pointing instead at Steve.

            “Pay!”

            “What?”

            “They’re sucking face in the sun room,” Claudia declared. “Pay.”

            Steve dug cash out of his wallet, and Pete cheered and high fived Claudia.

            “Congrats, man, you got thirty bucks! Do I get popcorn?”

            Claudia looked at him like he’d asked for Cruella Deville’s fur coat.

            “Do you want to go get it?” she asked. “Because you’d have to pay me _at least_ thirty bucks to go down there and break that up.”

            “It’s almost lunch time anyway, Pete,” Leena consoled.

            Pete beamed at all involved, decreeing, “Ah, yes, lunch time! This day keeps getting better.”

 

 

            Helena was in Myka’s lap, groan-whimpering at Myka’s hand sliding under her shirt, when she decided to run her tongue along Myka’s ear and whisper, “When did you want to have that talk, my darling?”

            “Not now,” Myka rasped.

            “Oh dear,” Helena said, sitting back with mock distress. “I had put all my faith in you to be the one with self-control!”

            Myka laughed.

            “Does that mean we’re never getting off this couch?”

            “Would you complain?” Helena asked, but she was already swinging herself off Myka’s lap and settling beside her.

            “So why are we doing this?” Myka said. “Besides how much fun it is, I mean.”

            Helena sat still for a long moment, half-hoping Myka would start first. The wild forward motion that had propelled her in her younger days had dwindled as her mistakes piled like rubble around her, and her fear of doing harm had found a welcoming bedfellow in her certainty that what she treasured most would soon be lost. She was not eager, now, to take risks or make confessions.

            But Myka was here. She was right here, damn it, and she deserved better than this girlish reticence for all that Helena had put her through.

            “You are my most cherished friend,” Helena began, “and I will maintain that above all other pursuits. If we’re speaking freely, however?”

            Myka nodded.

            “I’ve never known a woman as captivating as you are, Myka. I confess that I have longed to be your lover.”

            One hand reaching out to Helena, Myka sighed, “I shouldn’t have let you go first. I can’t follow that.”

            They were still talking when the others trooped downstairs for lunch, though Myka had ended up half reclining in Helena’s arms. No one commented (although Claudia looked like she was trying not to explode) when they didn’t quite untangle themselves fast enough to avoid suspicion.

            Artie’s only comment, when he could no longer ignore the situation, was to call them Jack and Rebecca while handing out assignments, and to inform Myka in no uncertain terms that he did not want to see or hear about it, at all, ever. Helena laughed about that at odd intervals all the way to the airport. She didn’t fully get over the amusement, in fact, until Myka fell asleep against her on the plane, and she ran her fingers through Myka’s hair, calm and content as they sailed again toward Greece.

 

 

            It was hotter than it had been before, even in the mountains, with the silence of the valley sweeping past below them and the air thinner and the wind blowing so differently than it had been in the foothills. The ground was dry and dusty.

            Myka had spent time over the past year reading up on this place, and she pointed out features of the sacred site as they passed. Some of them Helena already knew, but the delight on Myka’s face made it all seem utterly new.

            _Sap,_ she could imagine Myka scolding her.

            Helena had pulled her boots off, tucked them with all their jewelry under the olive tree along the Sacred Way. The stone of the Temple of Apollo burned the bottoms of her feet.

            “Maybe you should have just worn shoes you didn’t care about,” Myka suggested.

            Helena grunted in response as the preternatural coolness of the grass on the temple floor soothed her soles. Rolling out her toolkit on the searing stone, she helped Myka lift the cover over the meters. A bit of bleeding the tanks, a twist of a few loose nuts, and the pressure in the dam stabilized. Myka sighed.

            “Risky business, taking a breath that deep in a place like this,” Helena warned.

            “You have to want or need something for the Pythia to appear, right?”

            Helena nodded. Myka put her arms around Helena’s neck and grinned.

            “There there’s nothing to worry about,” she said, “because I have everything I could ever want right here.”

            “That was revolting.”

            Myka grimaced. “I know. What have you done to me?”

            Laughing, they covered the meters and wandered back toward the Sacred Way.


End file.
